Ken Reimer, director of the Centre for Enhanced Teaching and Learning, sits before the Student Engagement Wiki. Mike Erb / The Brunswickan

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FREDERICTON (CUP) — Faculty and staff at the University of New Brunswick are using a wiki to share ideas and help students become engaged in their academic lives.

A wiki is an online tool designed to interlink websites and encourage collaboration and community involvement on a single project.

“The [Student Engagement Wiki] is a great tool so instructors can see different strategies for using group work or encouraging discussion and trying to get more hands-on projects,” explained Ken Reimer, director of UNB’s Centre for Enhanced Teaching and Learning.

“It’s instructors sharing their own ideas by trying certain strategies and sharing how they worked. The wiki is open to people making comments and picking up on that.”

Reimer said the wiki, which was developed after 2009’s H1N1 outbreak and subsequent student absences, is off to a great start with about 150 articles, but he hopes to see it reach its potential with hundreds of thousands of ideas.

He defines student engagement as students becoming more connected to their learning experience. Rather than being the “passive recipient of a knowledge dump,” students are engaged in their own learning process. This way the process is much more student-driven.

UNB’s wiki was based on the results of the National Survey of Student Engagement, which is administered every couple of years to first- and fourth-year students to measure levels of engagement.

Janice El-Bayoumi, who was acting director of the Centre for Enhanced Teaching and Learning at the time, came up with the idea of using a wiki for instructors to develop courses that students could be absent from and not be penalized.

“My hope is that people will become engaged and participate. For a wiki to be successful people have to participate,” El-Bayoumi explained. “I just think it’s a great tool for all sorts of good information that will help UNB students be more successful.”

Reimer believes that, while some students would rather stay under the radar and walk away with a degree at the end of four years, most students want an enriched experience. They want their lives changed for the better and want to learn how to think in different and exciting ways.

“[Having] an active voice in their own learning on a small scale will enable them to have an active voice in the world and hopefully this is the start of that.”

Sara Rothman, a student development co-ordinator, thinks the wiki will serve to foster discussion and bring colleagues together, as well as students.

“Someone in engineering might not realize that someone in kinesiology has had great success with a particular technique or something new they’ve introduced to their curriculum, so this gives us that opportunity to really share and broaden our discussion bases,” Rothman said.

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