The Design And Implementation Of A Teaching Wiki

Web-based courses are a mainstay of modern learning. There are many websites that offer tutorials and courses on nearly every subject. These courses are made by either individuals or organizations. This thesis develops a website, Wiki Courses, that applies the wiki model to online courses. Users of the website are able to create and edit any course they wish. The content of every course is crowd-sourced by people on the internet and not controlled by any individual or organization. Wiki Courses uses Git as a database to store edits made to each course along with its content. Saving this extra information provides editors the ability to undo changes. Using Git as a database removes the need to manually create a system to store edits as Git already saves this information. This significantly speeds up the process of creating a wiki. Git is not traditionally used as a content database and so using it as such brings a number of challenges. This thesis explores the effectiveness of Git as a database.