Results from Spanish translation of survey for educational practicioners

Introduction.

This report summarizes the results of the WikiSkills online survey which was conducted in Spain in order to analyze educators’ current use and needs regarding wiki environments in their teaching contexts. In total, 41 educational practitioners have answered the survey. The report analyses the results of the survey for 26 primary secondary school teachers, as well as for university teachers and adult trainers (15 respondents).

Here we can see that half of our educators are from primary/secondary school. The other half are from university and adult. The “Other” group can be included in adult because they are teachers who teach another teachers.

1.- Short general national impressions

1.1.- Primary and secondary school teachers

Half of teachers are experienced with wiki environmnents, and demonstrate a high level of knowledge regarding the functionalities and the educational opportunities offered by such tools. However, they also perceive some obstacles to the implementation of wikis in the classroom, which can be overcome by promoting awareness of institutions, as well as facilitating adapted teacher training solutions. 

1.2.- University teachers and adult trainers

Taking a first look to the survey results we can see that our users don't have much experience and knowledge in using wikis. Some of them are wikipedians and they are a exception to this. These wikipedians have experience in using MediaWiki software.

Among the other users, we have some educators who have been using wikis inside Moodle or Chamilo, this means, inside eLearning platforms. The other educators have never used a wiki before.

2.- Impact on educational issues

2.1.- Results interpretation

Primary and secondary school teachers

Out of 26 respondents, 9 do not have experience in contributing to wikis, while 8 state that they contribute a lot. Furthermore, 4 teachers state that they contribute "occasionally", and 4 others “not much”. Generally, teachers have conducted tasks such as adding content to existing pages (16 respondents), creating new pages, editing typo and grammar in text, and adding graphical elements. Furthermore, about 10 respondents have been involved in administrating wikis socially. However, most of respondents do not have any experience with technical administration of wikis. Graph 1 shows the tasks conducted by teachers through wikis. 

24 out of 26 respondents are familiar with Wikipedia, or local Wikipedia chapters (e.g. "Viquipedia" in Catalonia). Furthermore, 9 teachers are familiar with Wikimedia Commons and 6 of them with Wikibooks. Finally, respondents use other wiki projects, among others Viquilletra (a Catalan collaborative project to share lectures), Experimenta_wiki (a wiki dedicated to science education), and Wikipartido (a wiki for creating a new political parti in Spain). Finally, some teachers mention their own wiki projects, such as "HKpWiki" and "Sopadepedres".  

Almost half of respondents are familiar with Wikispaces and Mediawiki. The other engines are almost unknown among them. 

University teachers and adult trainers

As we said in the previous section, some of our users have experience in using wikis, but just a few of them. Here we can see a chart of this.

Here we can see how some of our users have experience, but many of them have little experience (or any). We can said that the red and blue one have little experience, yellow and green have experience and brown are other cases. So, half of this target group have little experience with wikis.

Anyway, these users with little experience have contributed with wikis in the past by doing some tasks such as adding new content or fixing typos and grammar. It's interesting that these educators used wikis in the past but they said that they have little experience. Here we can see a chart from the results of the question regarding the kind of tasks they did.

We can see that tasks are very dispersed, and it seems that everybody is doing some work with wikis, but this chart is a little tricky. Taking a look into the results we can diferenciate between 3 kinds of users:

• The first ones are users that make a lot of work with wikis in all its areas (Adding content, fixing, administrating...)
• The second ones are users who add comments or edit some content. They contribute whenever they can
• The third one are users who never used a wiki.

The users who are used to contribute in wikis are also used with almost all the wiki based projects mentioned in the survey. On the other hand, users with little experience are used just with the most famous wiki based projects (wikipedia and so on)

2.2.- Educators answers

There are a lot of interesting answers to the free text questions regarding advantages and barriers of using wikis for teaching. Among them we have:

2.2.1.- Advantages

Primary and secondary school teachers

• Opportunities for collaborative activities: possibility of organizing of collaborative projects among equal peers, consulting the evolution of the project and the contributions of each member; fostering the respect of peers’ opinions, decision making processes, and contrast of information (several points of view on a same topic); promoting the symmetry among teachers and students in the follow-up and evaluation of the projects.
• Fostering students' motivation: involvement in innovative and unusual activities enhance students' receptivity. 
• Providing a context for constructivist activities: learners get involved in participative learning processes through the collective creation of content, within an interactive environment, and can learn in an autonomous way.
• Flexible learning environment: wikis enable the  adaptation and structure of content. 
• Elimination of space time barriers. 
• Presence of an external audience: possibility of involving external parts in a same project, communitarian support and correction of errors.
• Fostering expression skills. 
• Promoting digital literacy: students loose fear in editing content on the web.
• Usability: easiness of use and maintenance of the environment, easiness of sharing graphical and textual resources, rapidity of publication, visibility of the history, free of use.

University teachers and adult trainers

• Wikis allow to construct knowledge in a collaborative way. They promote personal competences related to teamwork and they require responsibility and autonomy from students during the learning path.
• To transfer the ability of creating to the students. Possibility of compare present versions (corrected by the theacher) with previous versions created by students.
• It's free, universal and allows knowledge dissemination
• Possibility of sharing and modify a work document
• Wikis are motivating, practical, visual and they can be adapted
• Social discussion
• Possibility of present a case and students can participate in its resolution, giving oppinions about it and correct each other before they can know the solution
• Wiki format and the idea of social collaboration. It allows constantly upgrade
• Being open source, you can program new extensions for personalize it

Conclusions of these free text answers

Teachers valued their free / open source and collaborative nature, mostly the possibility of collaboratively sharing and modifying documents, promoting debate among students and teachers, and possibility of updating published information.
Wikis are seen flexible and dynamic tools, promoting personal competences linked to group work. 

2.2.2.- Barriers

Primary and secondary school teachers

• Lack of teacher training: basic ICT skills, technical use of wiki platforms (e.g. integration of pictures), norms of participation / supervision, bibliographic quotation norms in Wikipedia, content licences, etc
• Technical barrier: teachers sometimes feel uncomfortable with a tool that students manage better than them. 
• Lack of motivation of some teachers to learn how to use ICT tools and unusual tools, as it represents added work.
• Lack of Internet connection and technical resources (computers, projectors, mobile phones, etc.) in all classrooms.
• Freedom of publication: the supervision of content is mandatory; furthermore, teachers may be afraid of giving freedom of creating and editing to their students
• Free advertizing in some platform providers.
• Time: the creation, maintenance of the platform, as well as the evaluation process, involve more time than other learning activities. In a teacher words, the time spent in elaborating resources has to be compensated. 
• Familiarization with the interface (internal browsing, no WYSISYG edition, etc.) and the methodology (intellectual property of texts and graphical elements), for students and teachers
• Lack of recognition of the authorship, as the contributions are only visible in the history.
• Reflection processes implied by wiki activities may be difficult for young students.
• Divergence of opinions among distant groups / people.
• Usability: a more intuitive interface is needed. 
• Lack of support from the institutions.
• Lack of diffusion of the wikis.

Universtity teachers and adult trainers

• Students don't accept wikis.
• Deficient ICT formation
• Copy of work
• There is no self-learning mind amog students. It's complicated to evaluate the quality of contents
• Metodology is focused in teachig but in learning, so, it's more oriented to contents accumulation than to the use of tools that can encourage the student to do his/her own research, thinking and create collaboratively with other people, the subject knowledge,...
  It forces to a change in the teacher role, who goes from being the main character in the learning process to become just a motivator, and that is not easy.
  However, it needs a better technological resources equipment in the classroom and/or access to the internet at students home
• Ignorance and don't see clear the advantages of learning to do it

Conclusions of these free text answers

One of the main barriers is the quality of the contents of wikis used in education, where some kind of quality certification is seen as a possible solution.

Training and information on wikis is seen as the main tool to overcome barriers in their use, as well as a change in the traditional training model.
Simplification in wiki editing is also noted, as a key to introduce them to novice users. (Providing similar editors to word processors)

2.3.- Impact

Taking a look to the results we can see that the impact of the project can be very good for education because of the following reasons:

• Students will be more involved in the work
• Teachers and students will be able to work collaboratively
• Teacher will be able to know is students are learning in the correct way
• Students will be motivated by doing this wor
• The pedagogical opportunities provided by wiki environments will be disseminated to institutions and to the educational society  in general, innovative teaching practices  will be valued, and ways of teaching will be reconsidered
• The opportunities offered by wiki environments will be demonstrated, by showing the different kinds of wikis and their functionalities, through existing good practices and practical examples of application of wikis in the classroom 

• The main one is that students don't accept wikis as a tool for doing their job because they are used to the teacher making the materials and they “to study” it at home.
• A lot of students have in mind that they don't need to know anything about the subject until the exam, and they don't care about the subject. The point of these students will be probably not to contribute to the wiki
• Freedom of publication: the supervision of content is mandatory; furthermore, teachers may be afraid of giving freedom of creating and editing to their students

3.- Conclusions

Regarding primary and secondary school teachers respondents, they often show a good experience in using wikis in educational contexts, and in identifuying adequate solutions for their successful implementation. Less experienced teachers show a high level of interest in such tools, as well as a positive attitude towards adopting new teaching methodologies.  

In addition, university teachers and adult trainers who answered the survey don't have much experience by using wikis (nor in education or in general) except a few of them who have a lot of experience in common wiki based projects.
Because of that, the impact of using wikis in their fields of knowledge for teaching their students will be very high and very productive. Students will be more involved in their own learning process and will have the satisfaction of sharing their knowledge with their partners and also with the teacher.
Of course this will happens just in case that the students and the teacher accept the wiki as another tool in their learning process.