A Student-Centered Online Writing Course

Abstract

This chapter looks at a student-centered online writing course, where peer correctionswere the sole source of feedback. Using the peer correction system-tool (PCS-tool),designed especially for the course, students wrote one text a week and sent their textsto anonymous readers for corrections. The study described here evaluated students’texts from 25 randomly chosen portfolios, looking at, among other aspects, the numberof unreturned texts and false repairs as well as the amount of improvement in thestudents’ writing over the semester. Based on the very positive results of the study, theauthor hopes that other universities will adopt the PCS-tool for their courses so thattheir students, too, can have the advantage of using this non-threatening environmentto practice and improve their academic writing. The PCS-tool is open-source andavailable to all interested parties.