Wikis in Collaborative Educational Scenarios: Integrated in LMS or Standalone Wikis?

This article outlines a set of features that wiki engines require to successfully host collaborative educational scenarios. The authors explore multiple issues that deal with the use wikis with learning activities. One of the first issues to solve is software support for assessment methodologies. The second is choosing between using an integrated wiki engine inside the Learning Management System LMS or an external standalone wiki engine. Advantages and disadvantages from both options of this second issue are discussed. The different implications of each option as far as individual student assessment, feedback, and grading are concerned are also analyzed. Among the expected results, the most notable are incentives to incorporate wikis in the teaching process, significant enhancements in usability, as well as allowing teachers to provide more timely written feedback on their students' individual contributions on wiki based activities, on top of the usual numerical grading. This paper presents the conclusions of 5 years of experience of work in the field of wikis in education, development of improvements on open source wiki engines and thus, building from scratch accordingly the new wiki engine for the LMS Moodle 2.0.