Wiki Based Teaching and Learning Scenarios at the University of Vienna

Harald Höller
Faculty of Physics, University of Vienna
Boltzmanngasse 5, 1090 Wien, Austria
harald.hoeller@univie.ac.at

Peter Reisinger
Faculty of Physics, University of Vienna
Boltzmanngasse 5, 1090 Wien, Austria
peter.reisinger@univie.ac.at

Abstract: The project eLearnPhysik of the Faculty of Physics at the University of Vienna has
designed various technical and pedagogical solutions based on the software MediaWiki in order to
support blended learning scenarios in academic physics education. By adapting and extending the
software base with regard to didactic and organizational needs (central login for lecturers and
students, access management, support for LaTeX and the computer algebra system Axiom), the Wiki of
the Faculty of Physics has been established as a major e-learning tool. A lecture in the field of
theoretical physics that has been given in the winter term 2007/08 shall be presented as an example
for a teaching/learning-scenario - from a particular assignment of learning tasks to Wiki pages
designed by students. Through this kind of online publication, the students' motivation to
professionally deal with physical issues is enhanced.

1 Integration of e-learning at the Faculty of Physics

1.1 Why We Chose MediaWiki

In 2005, when the project eLearnPhysik was born, the University of Vienna had not yet finished establishing a central e-
learning structure, so the main demands from an e-learning platform by the Faculty of Physics were:
• no licence costs
• easy to administrate
• usability
• sophisticated rights management
• accessibility and low system requirements for clients
• formula rendering
• extendability
• multimedia support
• support of collaborative editing

In consideration of these needs, we decided to use a Wiki software and among those available we chose MediaWiki
because the further development of this special Wiki software is granted (since also Wikipedia is based on it). The
University of Vienna's e-learning platform WebCT Vista (now Blackboard Vista) was largely inapplicable due to our
especial didactic and technical requirements.

1.2 Didactic and Technical Requirements

1.2.1 Open Content Policy

Our philosophy of produced content, either from students or lecturers, is free reading and writing. Of course there are
practical limitations to this philosophy, meaning that there are several sites that are only editable by administrators, e.g.
the Main Page or the Help section.
However, anyone with an account at the Vienna University Computer Service - ZID, that is (active) students and
employees of the University of Vienna, can be authors in the Wiki of the Faculty of Physics. In a way this philosophy
represents the idea of evolutionary dynamics emerged in early Wiki applications, namely Open Source Projects, where
Wikis are used to discuss and document the progress of development. For us, learning and teaching resources are “open
content” to be constantly improved and extended. Page histories and discussion sites as implemented in MediaWiki
perfectly support these processes.
1.2.2 Usabilty and Accessibility
One of the key aspects to be considered when establishing an e-learning platform are usability and accessibility. Thus
the platform has to be efficient, learnable and to ensure contentedness for a wide range of users with different technical
premises.

Efficiency: MediaWiki is written in PHP (it uses either the MySQL the PortgreSQL relational database management
system database in the background) and generates pure HTML that can be displayed in practically any web browser.
Data volumes between the web based Wiki and the client are comparatively low either. This means also students with
rather slow access to the internet at home can use such a platform without any difficulty.

Learnability: Editing, searching and navigating in a Wiki is generally quite intuitional and no other Wiki software is as
well documented as MediaWiki. Nevertheless the Wiki of the Faculty of Physics has some delicacies concerning search
and navigation that shall be discussed in section 2.

Contentedness: Since a majority of our students have come in touch with Wikipedia, since and the MediaWiki layout can
be adjusted only slightly, students quickly become familiar with the Wiki of the Faculty of Physics. The predominant
content in our Wiki is strictly text-based, so it can easily be scaled, printed, exported and searched.

1.2.3 Collaborative Working

When students are assigned to write corporately, they need to work out a common time management or divide labor
efficiently. In most cases the latter will be the more feasible choice, as a modular education system leads to distinct
self-organization and time management among students. Again, page histories, discussion sites and paragraph by
paragraph editing ensure, that content can be created independently of fixed times or places.
On the other hand, designated features the facilitate reconstruction of each student's workload for lecturers.

1.2.4 Formula Rendering

Until today, formula rendering in the web is a huge problem. Basic symbols are covered by HTML, but there is no
standard for sophisticated fomulae as they are needed in mathematics, physics and other theoretical sciences (MathML
and similar solutions need plugins or fonts that have to be installed or are not even available for all browsers or
operating systems). The most popular document markup language in theoretical sciences is LaTeX , which is supported
by Mediawiki.
Therefore virtually any LaTeX symbol can be rendered in Mediawiki by using the LaTeX syntax. As a consequence
students either have to become familiar with LaTeX syntax - which they are likely to need anyway in their further
educational and scientific career - or they already can resort to their earlier experiences with LaTeX.
Mediawiki renders these formulae as images (.png) and uses the LaTeX code as alternate text.

2 The Wiki of the Faculty of Physics

• http://www.univie.ac.at/physikwiki – main page (referrer)
• https://elearning.mat.univie.ac.at/physikwiki/index.php/Hauptseite – main page (actual URL)

Please note: all links to the Wiki of the Faculty of Physics given below with dots (e.g. .../Lehrveranstaltungen) are to be
read with the prefix https://elearning.mat.univie.ac.at/physikwiki/index.php.

2.1 Technical Adaptations and Best Practice

In the academic year 2008 we use MediaWiki version 1.10.1 with following extensions [3] and adaptions:
• Namespace: Generally spoken namespaces are abstract containers for items (i.e. sites, files etc.) that allow
logical branching of content in a Wiki. For clear disambiguation the namespace shows up as prefix of each
page title. By default there are 18 namespaces included in MediaWiki and any number of custom namespaces
can be added. Examples for namespaces in the Wiki of the Faculty of Physics are “Computeralgebra”,
“Information”, “Sandbox” or the “Projekt”-namespace which is restricted to members of the project
eLearnPhysik. Moreover we add a new namespace for each course that uses our Wiki, called “LV#” where #
runs from 001 to (maximally) 999. We decided to abstain from the actual course titles (like “Einführung in die
Physik”) in favour of shorter URLs. One major advantage of dividing Wiki content in namespaces is that it
alleviates searching for pages due to an emerging logical structure.
• ...?title=Spezial:Alle+Seiten&from=&namespace=200 – as an example: list of all sites in the namespace
of the course “Einführung in die Physik I”
• .../Hilfe:Namespace - help page to our namespaces (title, user rights, purpose)
• .../Hilfe:Navigation – help page to navigation #

• Subpages: Some topics and most of our courses are composed of many different wiki pages. In order to get a
 hierarchy of these pages (tree structure of pages) and an automatic linking between them we activate the
function subpage in MediaWiki for some namespaces. So we do not need to include an additional navigation,
because every subpage has an automated link back to the container page. Any slash (/) in a page name yields
to subpage structure.
Examples:
• Container page: LV014:LV-Uebersicht (Fig 1)
• Subpage: LV014:LV-Uebersicht/WS07_08 (Fig. 2)
• Subsubsubpage: LV014:LV-Uebersicht/WS07_08/Arbeitsbereiche/Hamilton_Formalismus (Fig. 3)

• User-Rights + Lockdown: Except for the main page we provide user-rights-management strictly based on
namespaces. The default MediaWiki namespaces can be read by anyone but solely edited by members (staff) of
University of Vienna, as mentioned before in the “Projekt” namespace only members of eLearnPhysik have
rights to read and edit. Whenever necessary we add further restricted namespaces, where rights can be given
also to particular users (e.g. for discussion forums in courses, documentation of interdisciplinary collaborations
etc.).
• .../Benutzer:WIKI-Berchtigungen - rights management

• Shibboleth (Single Signon Solution): This extension provides authentication to the central user database of the
University of Vienna, covering the entire staff as well as active students. The email adresses
(forename.surname@univie.ac.at staff and a012345@unet.univie.ac.at students) form the user names in the
Wiki of the Faculty of Physics, so changes as listed in page histories are perfectly traceable.
• https://elearning.mat.univie.ac.at/Shibboleth.sso/WAYF/idp.univie.ac.at?
target=https://elearning.mat.univie.ac.at/physikwiki/index.php/Hauptseite – login

• Axiom: Axiom is a free general purpose computer algebra system. If Axiom is installed on the sever, and the
Axiom extension is implement, the Wiki also works as a kind of powerful calculator. Calculation outputs are
rendered in LaTeX, so again there are no special system requirements for the client pc.
• .../Computeralgebra:Uebersicht/Axiom/Axiom_am_Wiki – Axiom online calculation tutorial

• Other used extensions:

• Cite: This extension allows to set footnotes for citations.
• Flashow + EmbedVideo: Embed flash videos (like video tutorials - .../Hilfe:Hilfevideos).
• PageNotice: Provide headers and footers for entire namespaces. We preferably use it as kind of navigation
bars, where we link important pages.
• TableEdit: Simple creation and edition of tables.

2.2 Working Wiki

One part of the Wiki of the Faculty of Physics is labeled as Working Wiki. Wiki pages in this part are designed by
students from different semesters and predominantly are supposed to support students' learning-process and do not
claim rigorous accuracy or flawlessness at all. These pages are marked with a Working Wiki logo that is linked to an
explaining text so that readers bear in mind, how these texts are produced. For various types of courses such pages are
developed in small groups of students (2 to 6) while they are assisted and guided by a team of e-tutors.
By this kind of online publication we motivate students to:
• form learning-groups, argue about subject matter, help each other to deal with comprehensive problems
• intensively look into a subject in order to
• self-contained wording
• write about issues so that colleagues form the same semester can understand them
• learn to be committed to the own written texts
• learn to analyze specialized texts (technical literature)
• learn to cite
• learn soft skills like teamwork and time management

In the last section of this paper we present an example scenario where students design Wiki pages in this Working Wiki.

2.3 Materials
Another major topic of our Wiki is to collect helpful and lasting digital (learning) objects, such as graphics, videos,
Mathematica notebooks, scripts, howtos etc. both from lectures and students.
Likewise, these digital objects are part of our “open content” and are available in machinable, open formats
(https://elearning.mat.univie.ac.at/physikwiki/index.php/Materialien).
2.4 The Project's Namespace
For internal communication, discussions, collaborative works (like this) and documentation we use a restricted
namespace. There is a number of operational areas that show the advantages of using Wikis for such administrative
purposes.

3 Teaching Learning Scenario

As an example for a blended learning scenario at the Faculty of Physics we present the “Unterstützung zu T2 und M2
mit Schwerpunkt Computeralgebra und Wiki” (TMREP) which serves as revision course to four courses in the field of
theoretical physics. In the TMREP we draw our attention to new didactic methods and techniques, in order to shape
both technical and social skills. The following sections shall present our teaching learning scenario from the lecturers',
the students' and our project's points of view.

3.1 Motivation for the TMREP

Mathematical techniques and computer sciences play decisive roles in academic physics education. For most students
these basic hard skills mark crucial challenges in their learning processes. Traditionally, students are assigned to solve
sample calculations and present their efforts on the blackboard in several courses throughout their mathematical
education. From a didactic point of view, correct solutions are as important as their physical interpretations,
visualizations and discussions. When planning the TMREP (in summer 2007) we put our main focus on these aspects of
skills and techniques. The Wiki discussion area and the fact that the lecture is held mainly by two e-tutors should
encourage students to post and ask also those “stupid questions”. Computer algebra applications (Mathematica, Axiom)
offer comprehensive simulation- and visualization chances.
The second main component of the TMREP is the Working Wiki. Students are assigned to form small learning groups
and collaboratively work out special subjects in the Wiki and present them in the face-to-face part of the course. This
combination of online publication and “live” presentation enhances both social and hard skills. After each presentation a
feedback and discussion session takes place.

3.2 Learning Environment

The online learning environments in our Wiki are composed of one overview page for each course (LV#:LV-Uebersicht)
where students find information about the course, lecturers and general learning material. Since most courses are held in
several semesters, all Wiki pages concerning a semester (content, organisatorical pages, etc.) are subpages of this
overview page (e.g.: LV014:LV-Uebersicht/WS07_08).
The semester-overview page again shows course times, lecturers' email addresses and links to further subpages, like
discussion forums, the Working Wiki and pages providing supplementary materials (e.g.: LV014:LV-
Uebersicht/WS07_08/Arbeitsbereiche, also see Fig. 3).

3.2.1 Working Wiki

This part of the Wiki is strictly students' playground. Lecturers and e-tutors solely edit discussion pages and offer
literature hints or links to helpful material and comments regarding the special subject that is to be worked out.

3.2.2 Materials to Mathematica and Semester Scheme

Another subpage of the semester-overview contains a scheme of all course sessions with associated material like
Mathematica Notebooks or lecture notes. On its discussion page students are required to post questions or
“problematic” topics that shall be (re)discussed in the class. Thus the presence phases of the TMREP are principally
guided by students' requests.

3.3 Evaluation
The project eLearnPhysik's evaluation (Embacher et al 2007, Embacher et al 2008, Embacher et al 2007b) of the
activities in the Wiki of the faculty of Physics is based on quantitative access statistics via log file analysis, feedback of
the students by quantitative questionnaires, qualitative interviews and quantitative questionnaires. Furthermore the
teaching staff is asked to give feedback to our didactic and technical methods.

The most important results are:

• An informal working environment supports interactivity, interplay and consequently enhances the learning
process itself.
• A high degree of integration of supplementary material and methods during classes is crucial for their success.
The majority of students point out that the rather low level introduction to Mathematica, held at the beginning
of the course, was very helpful. A number of presentations by students made considerable use of Mathematica
(complex visualizations) which was voluntary. Also the introduction to Wiki editing and LaTeX syntax
apparently was benefiting.
 • Supplementary, didactically processed materials (in the form of Mathematica notebooks and lecture notes)
allocated in advance are well received.
• Concerning collaborative works, nearly all students highlighted, that concentrating on a special subject in
small learning groups and presenting their accomplishments in class was enjoyable end extremely instructive.
Learning outcomes and the impact on the learning culture of these students is part of our project's long term
evaluation. Results are expected next year and will be published in phaidra (the digital asset management
system at the University of Vienna - https://phaidra.univie.ac.at/).

Links and References

Embacher Franz, Nagel Clemens, Primetshofer Christian & Reisinger Peter (2007). eLearnPhysik Project Report 2007
http://physics.univie.ac.at/eLearning/eLearnPhysikBerichte/eLearnPhysik_Zwischenbericht_2007.pdf

Embacher Franz, Nagel Clemens, Reisinger Peter, Primetshofer Christian, Höller Harald & Kühnelt Helmut (2007b).
eLearnPhysik Evaluation of the Project’s First Year
http://phaidra.univie.ac.at/o:67

Embacher Franz, Nagel Clemens, Primetshofer Christian, Höller Harald, Reisinger Peter & Wolny Brigitte (2008). eLearnPhysik
Project Report 2008
http://physics.univie.ac.at/eLearning/eLearnPhysikBerichte/eLearnPhysik_Zwischenbericht_2008.pdf

Screenshots

Figure 1: Screenshot of an overview page to a course (TMREP)

 Figure 2: Screenshot of a semester overview page (subpage of course overview page)

Figure 3: Screenshot of a student's page in the Working Wiki (subsubsubpage of course overwiew
page)