In order to diversity assessment in the final-year History module ‘Foreign Bodies, Contagious Communities’, Professor Roberta Bivins offered students the option of writing a blog, curating an online exhibition or producing a podcast or videocast for their applied assignment comprising 40% of their grade. Students who opted to create podcasts or videocasts were expected to create pieces that were 7 to 15 minutes long, and that used historical research to reflect on a contemporary political, social, cultural or public policy question related to migration. Students used clips from existing interviews and audio, such as news footage and existing oral histories, as well as material created themselves, including their own interviews and scripts. Students also submitted a bibliography and an 'audience statement' describing their intended audience and what it hoped to convey to them, as part of the assessment.

Using podcasting and videocasting as an assessment tool gave students who had previously been reluctant to contribute in seminars an opportunity to demonstrate their communication skills in ways that the seminar format does not always allow. Additionally, as students on this module were in their final-year, they were well-practiced in more traditional ‘academic’ communication and this brought them out of their comfort zone to think about how to communicate to a wider audience in their own words and style, while still engaging with the best and most recent academic scholarship. Professor Bivins also provided basic training in the audio-editing software Audacity and assured students that podcasts could be relatively low-tech while still containing a high level of intellectual content, which meant that students of all digital skill levels were able to achieve top grades.