Wiki Based Collaborative Learning in Interuniversity Scenarios

In business education advanced collaboration skills and media literacy are important for surviving in a globalized business where virtual communication between enterprises is part of the day-by-day business. To transform these global working situations into higher education, a learning scenario between two universities in Germany and Austria was created where students worked together in virtual interregional learning groups. This article reports about a study of an interuniversity collaborative learning scenario within the subject of e-business. Participating students collaborated virtually and documented a shared case study in a Wiki. When working together, learners used different synchronous and asynchronous tools for close virtual collaboration around a Wiki toolset such as forum, chat, video conferencing and other social media. Students applied given case studies (e.g. from Harvard Business Review) or they worked out a business case from their own experience, which covered a range of upcoming e-business topics. In an attending evaluation study with around 460 participants from two universities, 259 questionnaires were evaluated. It reveals several substantive effects like • Tremendous influence of interregional group work for media competencies • Hidden social aspects and conflict potential • Scenario design and different media usage • Teaching effort vs. learning outcome of such a scenario • Learning impact for different student groups depending on gender, employment, graduation or onlinemoderation. The findings of this study reveal several interesting aspects concerning media usage and show how students benefited from Wiki work in this virtual learning scenario.