Changes to the Course Wiki Tool

July 07, 2009 | 2 Minute Read

The Wiki tool in online courses has received a number of updates for the start of the summer term. Most of the changes listed below have been the result of watching how faculty, TAs, and students use the wiki tool and making changes based on their use and their feedback.

The following changes have been made:

•  The wiki archives have been completely revamped. This includes:
  
  • Seeing a list of all wikis from all previous offerings of the course.
  • Making a fully editable copy of a wiki from a previous offering in the current offering of the course.
  • Making a read-only archive of a wiki from a previous offering in the current offering of the course.
• You can now insert a file automatically at the current cursor position, rather than having to separately upload and then link to the file.
• The insert file view has been redesigned so that adding or uploading a file to a wiki is now on the same tab. This tab has been renamed, simply, "Add File." The "Link to Outside File" tab has been renamed "Add Weblink."
• Faculty/TAs/instructional staff can now hide the display of a wiki on the "All Course Wikis" page. This only removes the display of the wiki to students on the list of all wikis in the course. It does not delete a wiki.
  • There is also a "Show All Hidden Wikis" option for faculty/TAs/instructional staff.
• The list of administrative actions which students can take on a wiki are now clearly separated from actions which only faculty and TAs can take.
• The rich text editor has been replaced with a newer, more robust rich text editor. This new rich text editor brings significant improvements to editing wiki content on the Safari and Firefox Web browsers in particular.
  
• The "Page Order" tool for wikis with multiple pages has been moved into the "Pages in this Wiki" box on each wiki page. This makes it more convenient to change the display order of pages in the wiki.
• The hierarchy of titles, subtitles and page text has been made clearer by changing font size and eliminating the redundant "Page Subsection" option in the styling controls in the rich text editor.
• Keywords have been eliminated from the wiki setup page. The wiki search tool will now search the text of wiki pages instead of keywords.