Online assessment of laboratory coursework in microbiology : a case study

This study was undertaken to examine the feasibility of assessing an undergraduate laboratory microbiology project solely online, instead of students submitting and discussing their data in an extensive written report. PHP scripts were used to construct the web forms and the data submitted by the students were stored in a MySQL database. The online assessment proved to be time-efficient for both students and tutors, albeit that the marks achieved by the cohort were higher than expected and were considered to have given a slightly optimistic assessment of the students’ abilities, compared to two previous cohorts who had to submit written reports. Analysis of an anonymous student feedback questionnaire revealed that the online method of assessment was well-received by the students.