You can use a Wiki for the purposes of both group and individual assessment, and as both a summative and formative type of assessment.
If using a Wiki for the purposes of assessment, consideration needs to be given to the structure and purpose of your task, and how the marking workflow will be managed.
Summative assessment
Assigning your students the task of adding, editing, and contributing to a collaborative Wiki can provide a useful insight into their understanding of your unit. The Wiki activity within LEO has the capacity to track the edits made to a page, so even though a Wiki can be a collaborative space, you are able to mark the contributions of individual students. Both individual Wikis and collaborative Wikis can be used for the purposes of summative assessment.
Formative assessment
You can also assign your students individual Wikis to complete as a form of formative assessment. However it could be argued that assigning your student's an individual Wiki to complete is counter to the open and collaborative spirit of the Wiki activity.
Designing a Wiki assessment
When designing a Wiki assessment you should:
- Use an open ended task in which multiple perspectives and problems can be solved, researched and discussed in a number of ways
- Structure the task and align it with the unit and course learning outcomes
- Explicitly model and support good netiquette, and develop class wiki etiquette
- Establish the learning space as a neutral territory. Wikis are point-of-view-neutral, being collaborative spaces containing many points of view
- Arrange wiki groups around themes or topics, nominating, or allowing the group to nominate, individual students for different roles
- Model and support the learning in the wiki. Don't assume students know either the technology or your expectations of their collaborative writing
- Give clear guidelines for collaboration, posting and rewriting
- Provide time and structured early tasks involving feedback as students develop skills
- Develop clear rubrics and standards for student peer assessment
- Monitor the students' efforts and contributions to ensure quality and understanding
- Limit group numbers to around five students. Larger groups hamper problem solving processes, and can result in students experiencing cognitive overload or feeling that they lose their voice.
(from: Learning and Teaching at UNSW. (2014). Assessing with Wikis. [online] Retrieved from: https://teaching.unsw.edu.au/assessing-wikis [Accessed 15 Jun. 2016].)
The Wiki is not integrated into the Gradebook in LEO, so if you add a Wiki to your unit, it won't display as an item in the Gradebook. However you can manually add your Wiki as an item to your Gradebook if you wish to share your grades with your students this way.