Just over two years ago, BYU was ramping up for an accreditation visit by The Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities. One of the institutional requirements we faced was documenting the learning outcomes for all of our 400+ degree programs on campus. We needed to do so in a way that allowed for broad faculty participation in the authoring and maintenance of the documentation and that allowed for feedback from the student body and the broader University community (alumni, parents, other interested parties).

With various options on the table, we settled on MediaWiki. With a bit of customization, we integrated the software with our LDAP directory so that we could authorize faculty authors across campus–447 in total. (For reasons you can probably understand, we decided against letting students edit their degree program requirements at this juncture.) These authors have made over 12,000 edits to the learning outcomes documentation for BYU’s degree programs. We also added a simple feedback form to the wiki allowing any visitor to submit feedback to the program coordinators. To date, over a thousand feedback submissions have been submitted. However, this is a small percentage of the feedback based on student reaction to the information available on the wiki as it has been the topic of discussion in college forums with administrators and students, college surveys, in-class discussions, and end-of-semester surveys. The wiki is also regularly referenced in course syllabi across campus.

Long after the NWCCU campus visit, BYU’s Learning Outcomes Wiki is alive and well and an integral part of the teaching an learning ecosystem on campus.