Wikipedia in universities: a guide to good practice
Although Wikipedia is an information source used extensively by students at all academic levels, it is hard to find higher education courses in which Wikipedia has a formal role in the learning process. Using the principal results of the Wiki4HE project as its foundation, this article briefly describes key factors that influence the decisions of academic staff regarding the use of Wikipedia in their teaching. In addition to technological factors relating to the user-friendliness and utility of the work platform this encyclopaedia provides, it also examines the academic and professional factors that have a greater influence: the perceived quality of Wikipedia, its social image, the 2.0 profile of academic staff and their collaborative attitudes, and institutional recognition of this resource.
The article has two main objectives: the first is to highlight the importance of the opinions academic colleagues have of Wikipedia, and the influence this has on decisions to use the encyclopaedia actively in teaching; the second is to show how this decision could be affected by access to a guide to good practice, one that systematically brought together the experiences of other academic staff and enabled an improvement in Wikipedia's social image.
ODS
Antoni Meseguer-ArtolaAssociate Professor at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC). He holds a Doctoral Degree in Economics and Business Sciences and a Master's Degree in Economic Analysis, both from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). He also holds a Bachelor's Degree in Mathematics from the University of Barcelona (UB).
Formerly an Assistant Professor at the UAB, Professor Meseguer-Artola is currently an Associate Professor at the UB. At the UOC he held the roles of Director of the Bachelor's Degree in Work Sciences (2001-2006) and Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Business Sciences (2006-2010).
As a member of the IN3 research group ONE, he has authored a number of articles and conference papers on Price Competition, E-commerce and E-learning. Professor Meseguer-Artola has also authored teaching material on Mathematics and Statistics.
