Creating Awareness for Using a Wiki to Promote Collaborative Health Professional Education

Abstract

A Wiki is an expandable collection of interlinked web pages that allows users to quickly and easily create and edit content. Wikis can be used for obtaining information and knowledge. They can also serve as a method of virtual collaboration to share dialogue and information among participants in group projects or allow learners to engage in learning. Wikis enable such activities and actively involve learners in their own construction of knowledge. In this paper the authors discuss the wiki they created (http://bihs-wiki.wikispaces.com/) for the Bangladesh Institute of Health Sciences. A brief orientation lecture and a hands-on workshop were arranged for all users. Content development for the wiki and learning activities went on concurrently. Students were more enthusiastic in this process and acted as ambassadors. The wiki is an effective platform for sharing information, experiences, and resources among health professional educators and learners.