Stewart had his students create their own textbook using an online collaborative process known as Wiki. This collaborative process is the same one used by www.wikipedia.com.

“I was overwhelmed,” said Patty Cady, a junior from Lewiston, Idaho. “I didn’t know how any of us were going to be able to successfully create our own textbook.”

The idea was simple; students were separated into different groups and each group was assigned a topic, such as poetry. Then, each student would search for material that would help teach their fellow classmates about the subject. Stewart said if anyone in the class found incorrect information in the wiki-textbook, they would simply replace it with correct information.

Because it was a collaborative process, Stewart said the entire class was to receive the same grade for the project.

“I’m not a huge group project kind of person, so letting go of the control over my grade and entrusting it into the hands other students was difficult,” Cady said. “I’m happy to say I wouldn’t have a problem now because everyone worked really hard on the project and it was turning out great.”

But due to some technical difficulties the entire wiki-textbook was lost shortly before it was to be completed.

“I was really disappointed,” said Andrew Flamm, a sophomore from Rexburg, “because it was really coming along and we had put a lot of work into it.”

Other students voiced their disappointment at losing such a large project, but Stewart doesn’t view it as a loss. He said the experience itself was a valuable teaching tool and because the students actually created the content it will stick with them in a more enduring way. He recited the adage, “I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand.”

Other professors see a future for wiki-textbooks at BYU-I.

Ben Woodruff, a professor in the Mathematics Department, is involved in a more long-term wiki-textbook he hopes will be completed in one or two years.

“I want students to help contribute,” Woodruff said, “I think there is great value in students creating something.”

Woodruff also said the Mathematics Department is currently working on a statistics course free of external sources such as print textbooks. It instead could possibly use a wiki-textbook created by faculty members and perhaps students as well.

“I just wish that I could create online papers for some of my other English classes,” Cady said. “I think they would be more interesting to read and watch than a handful of pages on existentialism in the middle ages.”

The word wiki actually means “quick” in Hawaiian and is a reference to how quickly online pages can be edited using a wiki mark-up language instead of the Internet’s standard hypertext mark-up language.