Uživatel:CeSt/H

WikiLectures – a new tool for medical education based on technologies of Web 2.0

Martin Vejražka, Čestmír Štuka and Stanislav Štípek

Charles University in Prague, 1^st Faculty of Medicine

Portfolio of e-learning tools for medical schools is now expanded with a new, technologically advanced device – WikiLectures (WikiSkripta). Nowadays, the tool is filled in Czech and Slovak languages (https://www.wikiskripta.eu) but the English version is also ready to be filled up (http://www.wikilectures.eu/). WikiLectures are a web repository of medical teaching texts based on one of Web 2.0 technologies, wiki. It is very easy to create, edit and update teaching materials in this electronic textbook. Compared to other instruments, WikiLectures facilitate collaboration of multiple authors. It is also possible to take easily an already created text and incorporated it into a wider article. WikiLectures were established at the 1^st Faculty of Medicine, Charles University in Prague, in 2007. After a period of technical development and after verification of the principles, WikiLectures have been opened to all medical faculties of the Czech and Slovak Republic since the end of the year 2009.

Basic properties of wiki

Wiki is designed for creating and storing texts, illustrated by figures and some other file types. It uses a very simple language for formatting of text and links, and for creating of structure of the pages. Wiki is mostly known to the general public thanks to Wikipedia, an opened web encyclopaedia that can be edited by anyone. Editing is so easy in wiki that each user can handle the first steps by himself at the first attempt.

In principle, different types of access permissions are not distinguished in wiki: anyone can create new posts and edit existing ones. Special rights, necessary for really technical interventions only, are required just for a small number of administrators. In practice, it appears that despite the large openness, information in wiki-projects is quite reliable. The security and reliability is guaranteed in two ways. First by technology. There are tools that allow any possible "wiki-vandalism" to be combated effectively. The second aspect of protection is care of editorial staff. More over if the number of active users overcome so-called supercritical number, inaccuracies and errors are amended very quickly.

WikiLectures are not Wikipedia

Although WikiLectures and Wikipedia have many common principles, both use the same engine, and it can even be said that Wikipedia is inspiration to WikiLectures in many ways, there are fundamental differences between these two projects. Wikipedia is an online general encyclopaedia. Articles in it must comply with the encyclopaedic style; each contribution must be understandable separately to the reader. Texts in Wikipedia should be accessible to a wide audience. WikiLectures are, by contrast, an internet textbook covering a specific area – medicine. Some prior knowledge may be required to understand a particular text. Authors may assume that the student will read "chapters" in a certain order. Contributions may also be more detailed than that in Wikipedia. It is a teaching text, which does not respect boundaries of individual classes. On the other hand, every teaching material of WikiLectures must be written and offered to readers with certain "learning objectives".

Involvement of students

The authors of WikiLectures are not only teachers – quite the contrary, a number of quality texts are inserted by students. Teachers can use it later to assemble larger chapters; one may correct it, sort it, etc. However, students are involved in WikiLectures in a much larger extent. The students of medical faculties constitute a greater part of the technical editorial office – a team that maintains structure of WikiLectures, helps novice authors to finalize texts, adapts the user interface, etc.

Article verification

As we noted earlier, the accuracy and credibility of contributions to WikiLectures are ensured, to a large extent, by technological measures. In order to further increase the reliability of texts in WikiLectures, a tool for verifying the quality of articles by teachers was introduced. Educators of medical faculties can check the texts and “sign” them in an established way. Information about verification clearly appears in the header of the article. It is however still possible to edit the article. But, once it has been adapted, information about verification in the header of the article is changed, so that the reader is informed that the current version differs from the proven one. A single click can return the reader to the checked version, or to a comparison chart displaying the differences between actual and checked version. Moreover, both author of the article and teacher who checked it receive automatically notification about changes.

WikiLectures among other learning instruments

The birth of WikiLectures brought to the students and teachers a powerful, yet simple, easily accessible and safe tool for creation of teaching materials based on texts. Especially for text documents, the wiki-technology is extremely beneficial, as compared with traditional methods (using a text editor, distributing materials as pdf files, etc.). Wiki facilitates cooperation of authors, as well as amending and updating the text. Moreover, the resulting document is immediately accessible to readers. On the other hand, compared to other instruments, there are also some limitations of WikiLectures. For example, current technology does not allow to control the access to sensitive materials, which is sometimes necessary for medical education. Despite this fact, WikiLectures become not only a complement to other e-learning tools, but they are even superior in some aspects. Their great potential can be documented by the strong and sustained growth of the number of contributions: after a year and a half, 1500 articles were posted and monthly increment is growing. In the last year, WikiLectures encountered more than a million of accesses. Another fact demonstrates growing reputation of WikiLectures: the search engine Google ranks medical texts from WikiLectures often among the first results – despite their short existence. This means that articles of WikiLectures are popular, often more than comparable texts in other sites. We believe that WikiLectures may soon become a major tool for production and dissemination of electronic medical teaching texts.