Wikis as Support for English Studies’ Distance Students to Analyse and Produce Est Texts

Abstract

This paper describes the evolution that a subject such as Inglés para Fines Académicos y Profesionales II: Textos Científico-Técnicos (IPAII) / English for Science and Technology has experienced to improve the quality of its teaching, characterised by the promotion of collaborative work among the students and the critical reading of bibliographic references recommended during the course. Due to its nature, with no face-to-face tutorials and based on the analysis and writing of short pieces of EST texts, the teaching team devised the idea of creating a shared space in the form of a wiki so that all students had access to the same working texts. The announcement of the closure of Wikispaces in July 2018 has obliged the teaching team to think about other alternatives for collaborative work without affecting the instructions provided in the course guide. Although some of the most useful features -such as delving into the history of changes for later analysis- have been lost with the modifications carried on during the year 2017-18, others such as the debate on specific topics arisen from the analysis of the texts have been reinforced.