Studying Online;Succeeding through Distance Learning at University

QUICK TIP: Join relevant social networking groups for your uni-
versity and your degree studies. Even if you are only an occa-
sional user, they give you a sense of belonging and can boost 
your studies. 
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 STUDY WIKIS 
Wikis are collaboratively produced sets of web pages. Te frst 
wiki was established in 1995. Te developer of the frst online 
wiki was a programmer who wanted to create sets of web pages 
quickly. Rather than call it something like “quick web”, he coined 
the term “wiki”, which is derived from the Hawaiian word 
wiki-
wiki
, which means “fast” or “quick” (Leuf and Cunningham, 2001). 

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100 Studying online 
Many online modules will include a wiki, and I mention them here 
because they are places where you can discuss information. Often 
a wiki has a discussion section akin to a forum, as well as the main 
wiki pages themselves. 
You may fnd wikis embedded within your module materials. 
Popular VLE software, such as Blackboard and Moodle, contain 
wiki tools. Tese will be set up by the module leader or course 
administrator. Tey are available for students to compile shared 
notes, for example, and discuss what they are learning. Other 
popular academic software, such as Canvas or Google Classroom, 
do not contain wikis, as such. In Canvas, you would just be edit-
ing a page, and in Google Classroom, you would be working on a 
shared Google Doc document. Some universities now use Micro-
soft Teams to run online learning environments, and this includes 
a wiki option within each of the individual teams. Another possi-
bility is that your module may include a Microsoft OneNote “class 
notebook”. Tis is similar to the concept of a wiki in that anyone 
can edit the pages and add information collaboratively. 
Regardless of the software used for your course wikis, they can 
be an essential part of your studies. Indeed, some lecturers will 
use the wikis as part of the assessments they make. You may also 
fnd that wikis are used for a tutorial group where everyone in the 
group collaborates to discuss a topic before the tutorial session. 
However, despite their popularity, wikis as a means of discussion 
have some downsides that you will need to think about. Te main 
problem that wikis have is the concept behind them, of needing 
to be able to collaborate fast. Tis means that in many instances, 
all you have is a blank page or a page with some text to which you 
can add extra material. It is usually just click and type. Often there 
are no stylistic tools, and making something bold, for instance, 
can be cumbersome compared with a word processor. Tis makes 
wikis unappealing for many people. Indeed, when comparing the 
use of wikis and forums for online studying, researchers found 
that wikis were not as popular (Kear et al., 2010). Indeed, students 
were somewhat concerned about wikis because they allow other 

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