Using Wikis to enhance interactivity in teaching and learning: An engagement with Gilly Salmon’s Model

The teaching and learning process is becoming a big challenge at Higher Education Institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa. This is mainly due to the challenges created by the liberalization of University Education and the implied surge in student numbers. The situation in Makerere University is not different, the challenge of large student numbers has left lecturers with no option but to use teacher- centered methods of teaching like lecture methods. These methods emphasize memorizing of facts, singular interpretation of historical facts, limit teacher-student interaction and prohibit interactive classroom engagements which in turn compromise the quality of teaching and learning. Wikis were adopted as an intervention to enhance interactivity between teacher-student, student-student. Wikis are conceptualized as web applications that allow groups of users to collaboratively add and edit web content without any programming knowledge. Wikis were particularly chosen because they are free and easy to use and also foster and sustain collaborative sharing of history meanings with in a particular context and time. The study was purely qualitative taking Makerere University (MU) as the case study. Study participants entailed, 10 second year pre-service teachers offering History Education as one of their teaching subjects at the School of Education, Makerere University. These participated in the study on a voluntary basis. Study data was obtained from a three weeks pilot study (1December-21 December, 2013), informed by Gilly Salmon’s five stage model of online learning. The steps within the model include; access and motivation, online socialization, information exchange, knowledge construction and development. All activities on the wiki platform were designed based on these five steps to promote group scaffolding in the teaching and learning process. Data was captured through semi-structured interviews and observations of participant and educators’ activities at each step of the model. Results revealed increased interactivity between teachers and students at the different stages of the model. Participants were able to support and own their learning under the guidance of the teacher. However, it was established that there was limited/no active engagement at the steps of knowledge construction and development. Further research will focus on using wikis on last steps of Gilly’s five stage model to explore and develop understanding of its applicability in the teaching and learning process.