Course development

This year we added a new peer review aspect to the lab report, which is the graded course examination. This began with an interactive workshop on how to give and take effective feedback, and culminated in peer-to-peer assessment of lab reports.

Not much was changed this year. We continue to have a large lab report instead of a timed exam for the final assignment, and this is working well. Students enjoy the project, and we find it to be an effective assessment of skills and knowledge.

This year for the first time, we did not have a time exam as the final TEN1 assessment. Instead, we assigned final course grades based on individual lab reports based on teh experiments performed during the course. This mode of assessment emphasises critical and analytical thinking, and data presentation, as well as the contextual use of supporting information from lectures and published articles.

This year the course had to be given entirely online because of the Covid-19 pandemic, so the lab project was altered to be a re-analysis of published data (rather than students collecting and extarcting their own samples). Our teachers and guest lecturers directly discussed the Covid-19 pandemic in terms of impact on human microbiome, clinical diagnostics and tracking, and municipal wastewater monitoring.

Compared to 2019, the course modules for 2020 were altered to be more in line with the Intended Learning Outcomes. Specifically, we introduced a new module focussing on the use of metagenomic technologies for clinical diagnostics. Assignment deadlines are now more spread throughout the whole course, instead of having multiple deadlines in the final week. All assignment deadlines are now provided on the first day of the course. The lab project was also altered to give students more ability to direct their own studies - students work together to design the metagenomic study performed in the lab course, whereas in previous course offerings the teachers had designed the study and chosen sampling sites.

This course was offered for the first time in 2019.