Group note taking in mediawiki, a collaborative approach

We present a group note taking project designed to improve student learning. Getting students to actively participate in class can dramatically increase learning outcomes. Traditional lecture methods, where students passively take notes, are not the most effective ways for understanding new material in class. We organized students into groups to record weekly lectures and motivated them through various class based incentives resulting in a living document that captured a semester's worth of class material which helped improve student understanding of the material. We developed the infrastructure to capture these notes using the MediaWiki platform, an easy to use wiki environment. At the University of New Hampshire at Manchester (UNH-M), a commuter college in an urban setting, students tend to be older with their time split between classes and work. For these students, optimally utilizing class time is an important element for success and incorporating active learning methods applied in this work will help develop those skills.