Using wikis in the higher education: The case of Wikipedia

In the last years, the appearance of new and revolutionary technologies has changed the society in all its aspects (economy, feeding, personal relationships…). Education is not foreign to these changes. Genuine concepts such as collaborative learning, massive courses (MOOC) or flipped classrooms have been incorporated at every educational level, although the maturity of students allows a greater capacity for innovation at higher education. Together with these concepts, new technological tools have been employed with educational purposes. In particular, wikis have been reported as ideally suited for collaborative learning. Thus, nowadays, several Universities around the world are running projects and events about the use of wikis in higher education. Therefore, in this paper we explore the use of wikis in the higher educational institutions, being focused on a special case: Wikipedia. Wikipedia presents special characteristics which make it perfect to reach not only the specific learning objectives of a certain particular subject, but also the transversal abilities so demanded today (such as teamwork or social responsibility). The research methodology followed is based on a review and update of the collaboration between the University and the Wikipedia. In particular, we analyze the collaboration of the Spanish and Hispanic American Universities in its different manifestations. In this work, we explain the most interesting results about this collaboration. We observe one increasingly activity over this collaboration due to the greater number of universities that are incorporated, especially in the last five years. Finally, we analyze more deeply the experiences about the use of Wikipedia conducted in the Technical University of Madrid and we present the obtained results.