Assessment by wiki

By Adam Gibson and Rebecca Yerworth

We’re keen to incorporate different methods of assessment into the biomedical engineering programme. This makes the process more interesting and engaging for staff and students, and allows us to teach and assess a wide range of transferrable skills. In a new module on anatomy and physiology for biomedical engineers, we teach the basic anatomy and physiology in workshops and in a dissection room, and provide enhanced context by asking biomedical engineers to give two-hour “case studies” where they describe how their research interacts with the relevant anatomy and physiology.

We’ve built on this concept of a “case study” in the assessment where we ask students, in pairs, to research and present their own case study. The twist is that we have asked them to prepare and produce this using an online wiki interface. This allows us to move away from the standard boring Word document and introduce new skills. We ask students to demonstrate advanced writing skills by writing for a lay audience. They also need to consider how writing a website is different from a typical document, and address topics such as accessibility, web design and ensuring that any images have appropriate copyright. Academic referencing is as important as ever but has a different nuance if hyperlinks can be used. We produced a rubric which shows how we emphasised these areas in the assessment.

Asking students to research their own case studies based on those presented by experts in the field fits in nicely with UCL’s emphasis on research-based education and the connected curriculum, particularly as an example of outward-facing assessment.

A wiki interface includes a “history” log which makes it easier for an assessor to track the contributions of each partner, and also allows permissions to be controlled so that only members of a pair or team have access to edit the document, but tutors can view progress. Once the assignment is complete and assessed, we opened up access completely. This encourages students to take pride in their work, and gives them something they can link to if they choose. We hope that our collection of case studies will lead to a useful resource as different cohorts of students add to it year by year. We will also encourage students in subsequent years to read previous submissions and hopefully learn from them.

The case studies wiki is now available for all to see.