Student produced media and the use of web based sites for the assessment of technical and communication skills in engineering students

This paper describes the development of new assessment approaches for engineering students through the use of video production and on-line blogging. The course team in Materials Engineering have developed an approach enabling students to explore ideas and publish work by creating a short film focussing on technical areas. This technical work was previously assessed by a written report and PowerPoint presentations. However, the team wanted to make the reporting more creative and fun for the students and so decided to incorporate a more visual approach introducing video production skills into modules taught on the programme. Discrete modules at all levels of the course were developed in this respect and the outputs of this work have been previously reported. For example, students were given the task of researching a topic in polymers or composites and the end production was a digital video case study handed in on a CD or DVD for assessment. This assessment task replaced a traditional 6 week case study that would have covered the same technical areas, but would have resulted in a group report and PowerPoint presentation. The students were supported with an initial seminar on video production skills, followed by weekly drop-in sessions for technical support on filming and editing. During the last two years students have been asked to produce a website in the form of a technical blog to report their work, both individually and in groups. The result has been an end of module presentation of the sites for summative assessment. The paper will describe the advantages and issues realised with this type of activity, utilising student feedback as part of the evaluation.