Board # 156 : QMRA Wiki: An Educational Tool for Interdisciplinary Teaching of Risk Modeling in Engineering Curricula

Quantitative microbial risk assessment (QMRA) is a paradigm that has demonstrated itself as a valuable tool in assessing the efficacy of engineering interventions through modeling and data analysis. One of the values of the QMRA paradigm is that in building the exposure scenario or conceptual model, the engineer understands their system better and can also predict changes to the system. The challenge in teaching QMRA to undergraduate and graduate engineering students is that QMRA is an interdisciplinary field that requires transdisciplinary approaches. What this means for QMRA instruction, is that the faculty member is faced with the formidable challenge of conveying essential concepts and guided implementation of the paradigm. This includes critical information from the fields of: microbiology, mathematics, physics, statistics, public health and engineering. Considering these needs the QMRA Wiki (qmrawiki.canr.msu.edu) was developed. It serves as an online location for a suite of educational material, tools, applications, data and models. Surveys conducted during a QMRA institute were analyzed to determine the efficacy of the QMRA Wiki for instructional success for QMRA.