Anatomy of a Course

Why Teach Health Professions Education with Wikipedia?

Instructors around globe are increasingly realizing the learning potential for engaging students with the editing of Wikipedia. While the collaborative editing of websites has been used educationally for over two decades (CITE Konieczny, 2007), the writing, critiquing, and editing of Wikipedia pages has been a particularly growing practice in the field of health professions education (HPE) over the past five years (Azzam, 2017).

A range of health professions courses are utilizing Wikipedia as a teaching tool in a variety of educational approaches. This project's recent inventory and review of health profession courses integrating Wikipedia identified 27 HPE courses that used Wiki Education's tools that engaged students with Wikipedia with varying kinds and levels of activities. These HPE courses were designed mostly for medical and nursing students, with a few courses designed for students of biomedicine, pharmacology, medical translation, audiology, and medical research. The greater objective of the HPE Wikipedia courses was to edit health care articles on Wikipedia in order to learn medical content, engage critically with biomedical research, and improve Wikipedia.

These courses have been found to increase student knowledge of Wikipedia[1][2] as well as their knowledge of health care resources. Students reported increased comfort with reading and analyzing primary literature[3] and core medical content.[4] Other positive results for students in courses that included Wiki/Wikipedia editing tasks included improving collaboration and teamwork skills, having their work read by a diverse audience, and enjoying the opportunity to contribute to a highly accessed public resource.[5][3][2][6] The student-edited articles from these courses were frequently highly viewed, with views becoming more frequent after their edits.[1][5][7] Researchers tracking articles edited in their courses found that the edits the students made remained after the course ended.[1] Students did experience some challenges in the courses. When editing Wikipedia students struggled between making edits that were comprehensive and readable, frustration with Wikipedia coding, difficulty engaging with the Wikipedia editors/community, and distrust of Wikipedia editors as content experts.[5][6] However, students increased their confidence in the Wikipedia process and understanding of Wikipedia, with some students even planning to continue to edit after the course activities were over.[2]

The HPE courses reviewed all integrated some aspect of evidence-based medicine and often included the following features: