COLLABORATIVE LEARNING IN PEERWISE WEB 2.0 TECHNOLOGY

PeerWise is a web-based system developed at the University of Auckland which supports Contributing Student Learning. Contributing S tudent Pedagogy means a pedagogy that encourages students to contribute to the learning of others and to value the contributions of others. PeerWise is typically used for collaborative learning of students through multiple-choice questions created and discussed by them. Inspired by the high level of engagement and enjoyment exhibited by those playing video games, PeerWise includes some simple game-like elements. Developing and answering questions and providing feedback on them through the PeerWise system can be involved in almost all types of higher education standard and distance courses. Since 2013/2014 academic year we have been using PeerWise in six computer science courses at the Matej Bel University. We used it as part of students' required coursework for developing of higher order cognitive skills, motivating student learning and as a presentation tool. In this paper we describe our preliminary results and findings from our experience. Peerwise was used by 95% of students in our 2013/2014 pilot use in two courses; 79% of final questionnaire participants enjoyed creating questions and learning from other PeerWise users and 88% of final questionnaire participants found the activity with PeerWise useful. We found out that creating student-developed multiple-choice questions repository is a meaningful activity that can be used to increase students' interest in various topics covering the area of their course learning material.