Abstract:

That highlighted outcomes of educational interventions should focus on ‘attributes’, or the related term professional competencies, is particularly influenced by the writing of Lesley Treleaven and Ranjit Voola (2009) while the focus on outcomes based approaches to student learning (OBASL) derives primarily from the work of John Biggs (2003). With its emphasis on attributes such as critical thinking and critical reflection, Biggs’ theory (Biggs, 2003) supports professional development in student pharmacists – especially the development of competencies such as teamwork and decision-making.

The satisfactory completion of a group exercise during the first semester of the B.Sc.Pharm degree (Pharmacy) programme is the subject of this paper. The assessment objective was to encourage students to engage with ‘Social and Administrative Pharmacy’ early in the academic process. The group exercise replaced an individual written assignment and was designed to simultaneously initiate the professionalization process (stimulating collaborative learning, teamworking and decision making) required in a professional programme and preliminarily align the programme with graduate attribute development and use technology, in the form of Wikis, i.e. websites that allow participants to add, delete and revise content, to enhance learning.

Students were randomly assigned to groups of 7 or 8, and directed to collaboratively produce a summary of maximum 500 words entitled ‘Roles and responsibilities of community and hospital pharmacists: Compare and contrast’ by the deadline date. Additional instructions included that a printed copy, signed by all members of the group, was to be received by the teacher by the same date and that, in order to be deemed to have satisfactorily completed the assignment, each student was required to make at least three significant contributions to the formation of the agreed Wiki.

Content delivery took the form of 4 one-hour lectures during the first few weeks of term. Students were introduced to the Moodle virtual learning environment in the context of ethics workshops incorporated into the same module by the same teacher. Additional support was provided in a resources folder including the material used during the lectures and online discussion fora, to post queries and seek advice, were also available to students.

Of a total of 79 students registered for the programme, 74 completed the wiki assignment. Wiki activity collectively involved 2526 online actions by the students, to include both viewing contributions to their ‘own’ group’s wiki and posting contributions themselves, demonstrating a rate of 35 online actions per student engaged in the wiki assignment.

Following completion of the assignment, students were invited to complete an anonymous student feedback survey on their opinion(s) of the wiki exercise. 57% of the eligible students completed the survey.

The outcomes of this anonymous, minimal student feedback survey will lead to several changes in the author’s use of wikis in the online environment to include review of group size, time interval allowed and word-count limits; more thorough student introduction to netiquette guidelines; clarification of the role of the signed hard copy; and separation of the completion date for the online wiki from the submission date of the signed copy.

Keywords:

Formative assessment, graduate attributes.