Life in the fast lane – interdisciplinary collaborative assignments using wiki technology

Graduating engineering students are not only supposed to have the necessary technical skills, but are increasingly facing a work situation with interdisciplinary teams, collaborating by means of digital communication tools with colleagues in distant locations. At the De Nayer institute and Leuven Catholic University, we have set up an educational setting in which our students gain the necessary skills for this type of computer-mediated communication in a multidisciplinary and international context. This experiment was first set up in 2005 and has run each year since then. Students from two different (related) disciplines participate : typically 400 first year bachelor students in the engineering sciences (3 + 2 years academic study) from Leuven Catholic University, and typically 200 first year bachelor students in the industrial sciences (3 + 1 years academic study) from the De Nayer institute. Obviously, the combination of large groups located at geographically different locations and from different disciplines gives unique opportunities and challenges for the students and teachers involved. We have used wiki technology for collaborative writing and a peer grading tool for flexible and fair grading of the collaborative work. The engineering students are divided in small groups (four students each) and collaboratively write a scientific paper during three weeks. We have provided tips and tricks for the collaboration, such as giving instructions how the work could be divided between the members or how and where they could discuss about the paper topics or problems. The evaluation of group work is notoriously difficult. In particular, the very large student group (over 600 participants) makes it impossible for the limited teaching assistant team to track every individual student personally. A peer grading tool was developed at the De Nayer institute which allows a fair grade for the student. The teaching assistants' role is then limited to what they are best at: giving fundamental scientific feedback about the papers produced by the groups. This group score is multiplied by the peer assessment factor to give the final score of the individual student. In the presentation we will discuss our experiences during the last three years and the changes which we have made to the educational setting over the years. We will also focus on the practical problems and how we solved them (partly). Finally we will discuss the students' perception, and the methods which could be used to further improve the experiment.status: publishe