ISSS608 2016-17 T1 Assign2 Wesley Chan

Introduction

While the use of Wikipedia among the general public is well documented, in this study we explore the use of Wikipedia amongst University faculty members as a tool for teaching in Higher Education. This study has two objectives: (i) to understand the factors that influence the use of Wikipedia in Higher Education and (ii) to understand what factors might shape their disposition towards the use of Wikipedia as a tool for teaching in Higher Education.

Wikipedia as a tool for teaching in Higher Education

In this context, we will investigate the following questions:

1. How prevalent is the use of Wikipedia as a tool for teaching in Higher Education? Does the adoption rate differ across university and faculty / domain?
2. Do demographic factors influence the perceived usefulness of Wikipedia as a tool to improve students' learning in Higher Education?
3. What are the factors that might shape academician's disposition towards the use of Wikipedia as a tool for teaching in Higher Education?

The idea is to gain insights into factors that influence and shape academicians' disposition towards the use of Wikipedia as a tool for teaching in Higher Education. The insights from this study can be useful to help universities and academicians improve the adoption of Wikipedia as a tool for teaching in Higher Education.

Dataset

Our dataset is obtained from survey responses to understand the factors that influence the teaching use of Wikipedia in Higher Education in Spain from the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology article (Meseguer, Aibar, Llados, Minguillon, Lerga, 2015). A survey of 913 faculty members from two Spanish universities - Universitat Oberta de Catalunya ("UOC") and Pompeu Fabra University ("UPF") were conducted to empirically understand what underpins faculty member's use of Wikipedia. Participants were asked whether they "Strongly Disagree", "Disagree", "Neutral", "Agree" or "Strongly Agree" to a set of 43 questions. Participants were also asked to complete a set of 10 questions requesting information on their demographic background.

Data preparation

We used Tableau 10.0 as our primary tool for re-shaping and re-coding the dataset. We, however, used Excel in order to create a new column to insert set of unique ID for each records, prior to importing the dataset into Tableau. We re-shaped the data in Tableau and recoded the variables e.g. Gender to Male and Female (instead of code 0 and 1), PU1 to "PU1. The use of Wikipedia makes it easier for students to develop new skills" to provide more context to the variable etc. We also recoded "6" in the Domain variable to "Others". For the variables Age and Years Exp, we created age and/or years experience band to aid our analysis. The metadata used for the analysis is provided together with the dataset. (https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/wiki4HE).

The dataset comprised a total of 913 individual records. There were 10 variables representing demographic information including Age, Gender, Domain, Education, Years of university teaching experience, University, Academic position, and whether the participant was a registered user of Wikipedia. We detected some missing data in the demographic dataset and remove those pertinent records with missing data in Domain and Userwiki. To note that there were missing data / responses in UOC Position, Other Position and Other Status, but as these data were not crucial for our analysis, we retained those data sets for analysis.

There were 43 likert-scale (1-5) type questions grouped into the following broad categories: Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use, Perceived Enjoyment, Quality, Visibility, Social Image, Sharing attitude, Use behaviour, Profile 2.0, Job relevance, Behavioral intention, Incentives and Experience. All the questions had missing responses, ranging from 4 records for PEU1. Wikipedia is user-friendly to 117 records for VIS1. Wikipedia improves visibility of students' work. We decided, on balance, to retain those records as those missing records are not pertinent to our study and/or would not materially impact our analysis. We are using the percentage of respondents who agree or disagree to a question for the purpose of our analysis.

We decided to retain and import all the variables into Tableau even though they may not be that relevant to our question at this point in order to allow exploration and uncover any unexpected pattern and/or relationship between variables.

Data analysis through visualisation

We explored several visualisation techniques and tools (e.g. parallel coordinates on High-D, mosaic plots on JMP) for our analysis, but we eventually decided to use the divergent bar charts in Tableau as our primary visual analytics techniques for this study. The divergent bar chart is well suited for likert-scale type of questions which is common in opinion survey and market research as we are able to visually see the level of agreement or disagreement and compare the percentage within subgroups.

Under the divergent bar chart, the percentage of participants who agreed with the statement are shown to the right of the zero baseline in one colour, while the percentage of participants who disagree with the statement are shown to the left of the bar / row in a different colour. The level of agreement viz. "Agree" and "Strongly Agree" are coded from light to dark blue, grey for neutral - respondents who neither agree nor disagree are split equally between the zero baseline and orange and brown for "Disagree" and "Strongly Disagree" respectively. We opted to change the Tableau's default colour palette for the divergent bar chart to the brown-orange-blue colour blind palette.

Analysis and Findings

(i) Wikipedia usage as a tool for teaching in Higher Education

For this analysis, we looked at the participant's response to the following questions "USE1. I use Wikipedia to develop my teaching materials" and "USE2. I use Wikipedia as a platform to develop educational activities with students".

Observations

1. Almost 70% of the respondents strongly disagreed or disagreed with the use of Wikipedia as a platform for teaching in universities, while only 10% of the respondents agreed or strongly agreed with the use.
2. This observation was consistent across both the UOC and UPF University.
3. Academics from the Laws & Politics faculty are staunchly against the use of Wikipedia as a tool for teaching in Higher Education.
4. The above findings were despite the fact that the university actually promoted the use of open collaborative environments in the internet and as a teaching merit (in the words of the respondents to questions on Job Relevance).

Click on the link below for the visualisation:

(ii) Perceived usefulness of Wikipedia as a tool to improve students' learning

For this analysis, we looked at the demographic profile of those participant who agreed or disagreed to the following question on the perceived usefulness of Wikipedia "PU2. The use of Wikipedia improves students' learning". Note that the x-axis range within each panel have been fixed to the same scale so that each panel has a common zero baseline, which allowed for easier comparisons across the panels. We showed the demographic profile as a coordinated set of divergent bar charts.

Observations

1. The use of Wikipedia as a tool to improve students' learning is a divisive issue among academics. About 40% of the respondents were neutral, while an equal split of respondents were for and against the use of Wikipedia.
2. This observation was consistent across both the UOC and UPF University.
3. Similar to the earlier observations, academics from the Laws & Politics faculty are the most against the use of Wikipedia as a tool to improve students' learning.
4. Years of teaching experience did not alter the view of faculty members towards the perceived usefulness of Wikipedia as a tool to improve students' learning. We would have expected the younger generation to have embraced Wikipedia.
5. Male academics in general seemed to be find Wikipedia more useful for teaching than their female counterparts.
6. A surprising observations was that academicians above 60 years are embracing the usefulness of Wikipedia compared to their younger counterparts.
7. The perceived usefulness is positively related to whether the respondent is a Wikipedia registered user.

Click on the link below for the visualisation:

(iii) Social image and Incentives may play an important role in Wikipedia adoption

For this analysis, we looked at the participant's response to the following question groups "Social Image" and "Incentives" to examine factors that might shape academician's disposition towards the use of Wikipedia as a tool for teaching in Higher Education.

Observations

1. Faculty members / colleagues' perception about Wikipedia may play an important role in the non-usage of Wikipedia as a tool for teaching in Higher Education, as reflected in the generally strong agreement amongst academicians that Wikipedia is not well considered and most felt that their colleagues doesn't use Wikipedia. There seems to be some element of social / peer pressure.
2. On the positive factors that Wikipedia and Universities can work on to promote the use of Wikipedia as a teaching tool in Higher Education are the need to provide a support structure (in terms of best practices guide, specific training courses or by colleagues) to ease the transition to Wikipedia.

Click on the link below for the visualisation:

Concluding remarks

Although we were able to answer our queries in this study, the divergent bar chart constructed in Tableau has limited interactivity when it comes to look at the interrelations across the response to the various questions.

Using the parallel coordinates visual analytics techniques in High-D, we were able to uncover that academics from the Laws & Politics faculty were against the use of Wikipedia as a tool for teaching in Higher Education, partly because the university does not promote the use of open collaborative environment in the Internet (contrary to what we observed earlier at a more aggregate level) and the perception of colleagues’ opinion about Wikipedia.

References

Meseguer, A., Aibar, E., Llados, J., Minguillon, J., Lerga, M. (2015). Factors that influence the teaching use of Wikipedia in Higher Education. JASIST, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. ISSN: 2330-1635. doi: 10.1002/asi.23488