THE BPO WIKI: A COLLABORATIVE BUSINESS PROCESS OUTSOURCING BODY OF KNOWLEDGE

This paper reports on a project to implement a wiki as a pedagogical instrument in the postgraduate course Business Process Outsourcing at the HTW Berlin. The purpose of the paper is to contribute to the body of experimentation with constructivist learning using wikis in higher education. As theoretical basis for the report, a literature survey discusses the potential of wikis in higher education including improved engagement, motivation and especially skills-based learning through collaboration. Also the main implementation challenges related to pedagogy, guidance and workload are discussed. Moreover, the types of wikis in higher education are classified into resource bases (library wikis), communication and coordination platforms (reciprocal wikis), and constructivist student-produced wikis. The second section presents an account of the BPO wiki implementation project in two parts. The first part describes the implementation process. The second part summarizes the first experiences using the wiki in education. While the first experiments with the BPO wiki were only partially successful, detailed assignment design and extensive preparation were found to be major success criteria. The project evaluation also found online peer tutoring to be a potentially useful way of controlling instructor working time requirements.