Collaborative online writing assignments to foster active learning.

To help students master the content of a neurophysiology course, they were asked to participate in collaborative writing projects. In the first two years, students contributed to a class wiki by summarizing one lecture and editing summaries of several others. In the second two years, students worked in teams of three or four to write a series of illustrated chapters spanning the entire semester. The second assignment kept students more engaged than the wiki project, and although they found it a significant amount of work, they also believed that it helped them learn the subject matter. Working in teams, however, was not always a happy experience.