Making group assessment transparent: what wikis can contribute to collaborative projects

This paper investigates the use of new media technologies, in particular wikis, for the compiling and grading of group assessment tasks. Wikis are open web pages that can be viewed and modified by anyone with internet access and are well known for their collaborative nature. Wikis are also transparent, which means that any edit/modification is recorded and attributed to a specific user. Such transparency has immense implications for the assessment of group work, as one of the major criticisms of group assessment tasks made by students relates to fairness in the distribution of grades. Therefore, the aims of this paper are to examine whether a wiki can help make the grading of group work fairer and whether the wiki environment encourages students to engage more directly with the contributions of other group members, thereby making it a truly collaborative experience.