ClassroomWiki: a wiki for the classroom with multiagent tracking, modeling, and group formation

Abstract

Wikis today are being used as a tool to conduct collaborative writing assignments in classrooms. However, typical Wikis (1) do not provide group formation methods to improve the collaborative learning of the students and (2) suffer from typical problems of collaborative learning like free-riding (earning credit without contribution) and lacking conveniences to facilitate teacher interventions. To improve the state of the art of the typical Wikis used in classrooms, we have designed and implemented ClassroomWiki---a Web-based collaborative Wiki writing tool that combines a set of learner pedagogy theories with multiagent tracking, modeling, and group formation. For the students, ClassroomWiki provides a Web interface for writing and revising their group's Wiki and a topic-based forum for discussing their ideas during collaboration. When the students collaborate, ClassroomWiki's agents track all student activities and build detailed student models that represent their contributions toward their groups and uses MHCF algorithm to form student groups to improve the collaborative learning of students. We have deployed ClassroomWiki in two university-level courses to investigate the impact of ClassroomWiki. The results show that ClassroomWiki can (1) improve the collaborative learning outcome of the students by its group formation framework and (2) alleviate free-riding and facilitate teacher interventions by its multiagent tracking and modeling.