Requirements for Successful Wikis in Collaborative Educational Scenarios

What are the requirements for the Wiki engines to be used collaborative learning activities? Can any general-purpose engine be used? Or is there a niche for an educationally oriented crop of wiki engines? Do these educational wikis need to be integrated within the LMS to frame the collaborative activity within the walls of the virtual classroom, or is it preferable to have an external engine? These questions arise to every teacher who is about to plan a wiki-based collaborative learning activity. In this paper, the authors examine the use of wikis in college courses at three universities. The findings of this research are introduced and adopted as new features in two major open source wiki engines used for education: the Wiki module for Moodle 2.0 (as a Wiki engine embedded inside a LMS) and Tiki as independent full-featured Wiki CMS/Groupware engine.