Advantages and disadvantages of using an external wiki over an internal hosted one

Advantages of an external wiki over an internal one

• Which you choose depends on how you're using the wiki: If the whole of the course taking place in the wiki it's a VLE in itself. And an external one might give you enough flexibility
• Supported in-house by IT department - they may be able to add or limit features as you require
• Possiblity of internal failiure - how good are college or universitiy back up protocols (having been stung on at least 4 occassions when back up procedures have failed)
• External wikis have the ability to stay very up to date and to improve on a monthly  (or even weekly) basis

Disadvantages of an external wiki over an internal one

• You may have space limitations (but you could always create more than 1 wiki and then link them together)
• Possibility of external tech failure (like when educspaces announced it was closing in the middle of people's blogging-based courses - luckily it was saved, but it's a message!)
• Which you choose depends on how you're using the wiki - if is it just a small part of a course using technology it may sit naturally within the institutional VLE and the wiki available within that
• The provider may start charging for the use of the service
• There may be some issues of confidentiality - if students are working on something that is case study based.