Students’ Attitudes Towards the Use of Wikipedia: A Teaching Tool and a Way to Modernize Teaching

Abstract

This paper presents a research on students’ attitudes towards the use of Wikipedia in teaching. The sample was comprised of students from the Pedagogical Faculty in Vranje, a higher education institution affiliated with the University of Niš, Serbia. Students were assigned to write articles on Wikipedia as an alternative to writing their standard term papers. That way the Wikipedia content became significantly enriched. They positively evaluated Wikipedia as a teaching tool. The results confirmed that students preferred creating articles on Wikipedia to writing standard term papers. Those results may contribute significantly to further improvement and modernization of university teaching.

Keywords

• Wikipedia in education
• Teacher education
• Modernization of teaching
• Higher education
• Teaching tools
• Research about Wikipedia