How to create a student lead Wiki

[NadBlanchette]

One of our teachers would like to create a kind of Wiki based on the questions from students.

Instead of sending emails, the students would ask questions in a public forum, and the teacher could provide the answers there for everyone to see.

They tried to use Discussions for that, but there are two problems:

1. She created a discussion for each category of questions. However, they are ordered by the most recent activity, so they don't stay in a logical order.
2. When discussions are copied from one course to another, the content of the discussions is not copied. The courses have several sections, so she would like the Wiki to be shared across several courses. We use Blueprints.

Any ideas on how to do that? Is there another tool better suited for this?

[Gabriel33 · Accepted solution]

The closest to a Wiki would be a Page which students can edit (and which can be copied between courses keeping their content).

Here are instructions on pages for instructors: How do I create a new page in a course?
And here's a guide she may want to share with students on how to edit pages: How do I edit a course page as a student?

I think the main disadvantage here is that she would need to worry somewhat about formatting, as most students may post questions in the wrong heading/bullet points, and breaking things (for which the page history may be useful).

Alternatively, if you have Collaboration available with Microsoft Office in your instance, she might be able to make an Excel spreadsheet: How do I create a Microsoft Office 365 collaboration.
I don't have Collaborations it in my institutional instance, so I can't test it (and in the FFT instance there's Google Docs, but not Sheets), but I think Excel may be useful here if you can lock the cells that you don't want students to change (such as the answers you've already written).

[dbrace]

Hi @NadBlanchette,

What @Gabriel33 mentioned is the closest option for what you are looking for.

Something else to consider is that one person (whether an instructor or a student) can edit a specific page at a time. Depending on the number of students, that could be a challenge to manage.

-Doug

[NadBlanchette]

Yeah, that's why I think the second options (collaboration with Excel) would probably be better. Someone also mentionned padlet or Lucid. We will see which one works best.