Quality of Service Provision

Partnership arrangements and project management

WickED was conceptualised and developed as a free online resource designed specifically to support the ‘Digitally Boosted Study Support Centre’ initiative which was a Ministry of Education funded Digital Opportunities project from 2001 to 2003. The Study Support Centres were located in lower decile areas and marae in both Christchurch and Invercargill and were designed to provide general study and homework support for students at the upper primary and intermediate level where gaps in educational achievement were thought to be prevalent (Winter, 2005). The design and development of the WickED website was undertaken by CWA New Media.

The original partnering of CWA and the first Digital Opportunities initiative lapsed with the completion of the three-year funding period in 2003 but the WickED site has continued. The goals and purposes of the site have changed from the initial intention of providing safe ‘Themes’ support for Study Support Centre teachers and a place for Study Support Centre students to have fun with educational activities and to publish their work to the gallery spaces. As a result WickED has morphed into a product that is now intended to appeal to a much larger and broader audience that goes beyond the needs of the initial Digitally boosted Study Support centres and includes teachers and students from mainstream schools across the country.

The WickED site is continues to be developed and maintained by CWA and currently receives funding support from the Ministry of Education. No other partners are involved at this point in time.

Operational characteristics

WickED operates as an asynchronous educational site for students and teachers who have access to the internet. WickED encourages a generally younger audience to independently explore and enjoy a wide range of educational resources some of which are information based and others of which are interactive  and include text based quizzes and manipulative games. A younger audience is noted in the literature as “appreciating animation, sound effects, mine-sweeping¹, geographic navigation metaphors such as rooms and 3D maps, clear instructions and interactivity. They liked content that was entertaining, funny, colourful and uses a good deal of multimedia effects.”(in Coogan, 2006, p.35) WickED also makes topical, fun and quality assessed classroom resources available to teachers.

The site is available twenty-four hours a day. According to the TKI server stats, most use of the site appears to be from Monday to Thursday with slower usage for Friday through to Sunday. There appears to be higher usage during term time. There is also higher usage from 8am through until about 11 pm with a higher usage bubble occurring between 9am and 2 pm. Students would appear from the server-stats to be making use of the site during school term times and during the school day so use would appear to be for school related activities. While some considerable home use also appears to be evident most use of the WickED site appeared from observations by the CORE research team to be made during school time, a finding also evident in the Nielsen NetRatings report (2006) p. 31.

WickED is representative of a different genre of educational website than AnyQuestions and StudyIt. The latter are both help sites staffed by experts who are available to field students’ direct questions and supported by resources such as databases and archival information specifically designed to assist students with meeting their immediate learning needs. WickED can be categorised as a digital learning object repository. Learning resources are gathered together and arranged by experts for students to explore and enjoy. Because students are encouraged to explore the site rather than directly target specific information they may need it can be harder to meet students immediate learning needs and they can be discouraged from returning. While some areas of the site offer help for students these appear to be minimally moderated and not widely used by students who were often unaware they could post to the site.

Knowledge is generated, built and developed by students in conjunction with experts AnyQuestions and Studyit. This occurs through structured online interactions with others (experts and/ or peers) that are archived in subject forums and searchable databases. In WickED knowledge is generated by experts in the field of educational software development for use by students. The pedagogical model on which WickED is based and consequent student ownership of learning is quite different in WickED compared to either Studyit or AnyQuestions.

An overall observation by members of the research team was, “that there was a whole lot of material, some of it intriguing, some very cool, but also provided somewhat serendipitously and without an evident development strategy”.(Research team - site observation notes.)

How students found working in the online environment

As outlined in the introduction to this report finding students who were regularly using the WickED environment on an ongoing basis became a major challenge for the CORE research team. Evidence from both the CORE and the Nielsen NetRatings teams indicates that the greater majority of students surveyed were new or relatively new to the site. Few of the students who were interviewed had visited the site previously and knew it well enough to be able to comment with a great deal of depth on the various features and resources available.

This information is somewhat at variance with the server statistics, which indicate the site generates a reasonable level of traffic although a considerable proportion of this is generated from US servers with New Zealand users being the second largest group to target the site. A closer look at the server stats also indicates a very small percentage of users spending more than 15 minutes on the site and a majority spending less than 30 seconds on the site.²

Most students interviewed indicated they enjoyed the interactives and these had been the reason they had visited the site. Students in the surveys indicated they enjoyed the colours and sounds of the site and a good number of students found the site interesting, exciting and fun. The immediacy of the site was also appealing for several interviewed students who commented they could go there and find what they wanted without having to wait for an operator as with AnyQuestions. Others commented on the fact that there was more there than text that you needed to read and this was a positive aspect of the site.

Some aspects of the WickED site appeared to annoy a number of students. The homepage sign in, a bubble featuring student’s names, was not a popular feature. The faceless hosts of Wiki and Ed also caused some confusion, and a number of students felt the site needed to allow students more opportunity to personalise or customise the way they could view pages like Bebo³ What is also interesting is that a number of students actually felt that locating what they needed on the site was difficult. Many students preferred a powerful search tool to target what they wanted rather than browsing content and felt that it was simply easier to use Google to directly target what was wanted rather than use WickED.

The numbers of students who do not return or develop a level of loyalty towards the site is of concern.