Here are three ways of configuring a wiki for your course. The options have mainly to do with privacy: do you want your students' work publicly viewable. As a side-effect of this choice, things become slightly simpler or slightly more complex to organize.

Option A: Everything is world-viewable

The simplest option is to make all the content in your wiki, including your own and your students', world-viewable. If you choose this method, you should set your wiki to Protected.

Option B: Only people you approve can view (or edit) content

With this setting, everything is private. After students receive an account on the UML wiki system, you must individually approve them to "join" your wiki, thereby allowing them to view or edit content.

These options are illustrated below.



To summarize, Option A is the most open (everyone in the world can read everything) and Option B is the most closed (only UML wiki members that you personally approve can see anything).

Option C: Two wikis, one publicly accessible, the other private

As a compromise between these two extremes, you can set up a pair of wiki spaces for one course. One of these is publicly viewable and holds course content such the syllabus, assignments, and other materials you would like to publish for all. The other wiki is for student-produced content and is private, so that only members of the course (that you have approved) can view the content.

This option is illustrated below.



Choosing among these three options is essentially based on your course pedagogy. If your students will be producing work that will reflect positively upon them and is of general interest, then it would be wonderful to have it be published to the web for all to see. Option A is the right choice.

On the other hand, if students are creating sensitive material that should remain private to members of the course only, then you should use a private wiki for this material. Option B is the simpler choice, and Option C allows you to share the elements of your course design that you would like to publicize.