Peer Learning and Peer Assessment to Enhance Participation in Online Courses: A Brief Theoretical Overview of Research Findings and Strategies

Introduction

The course was conducted on an e-learning platform developed in a Moodle environment and active since February 2012. Two hundred teachers participated in this specific edition of the course, in the context of a wider initiative that involved almost two thousand teachers and was generated in virtue of following collaboration between the Regional Scholastic Office of Apulia and the ERID Laboratory of the University of Foggia. A web portal and an e-learning platform were created with the educational objective of offering basic competencies regarding Specific Learning Disabilities in order to improve the quality of teaching oriented toward individuals with SLD and to reduce scholastic failure. The scientific objective, on the other hand, arises from the need of developing an on-line community of teachers that would use the digital resources also after the end of the course in a self-sustaining repository of good practices and learning materials.

ERID laboratory’s expertise in the design and management of e-learning courses for teachers, and generally for adult professionals, proved difficult to achieve the goal in such a compulsory educational setting, based mostly on the external motivation of some kind of certificate to be obtained, valuable for their career development. In other similar experiences, a firm resistance against communication and interaction was observed via online learning environment tools (forums, chats, messaging) and a general lack of interest in building collaborative practices.

A set of strategies were then experienced to facilitate the participation of this particular kind of adult students in on-line communities. The most efficient proved to be the constructivist pedagogic approaches oriented toward the cooperation and co-construction of knowledge and meaning. Significant improvements in community participation and learning outcomes were observed specifically after transforming all the processes related to learning assessment from a set of final summative assignments to an activating lever for internal motivation and a collaborative learning tool. Commencing from assessment the whole learning experience was progressively re-designed; hence the following case study was set up to observe more closely the phenomenon.

The following are the goals of this intervention research:

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  To foster interaction and communication within an online learning community.

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  To train educators to use an innovative pedagogic model and an alternative assessment method that may be applied in their professional practices.

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  To confirm that through innovative teaching strategies centered on the user and based on collaboration, such as peer learning and peer assessment, meaningful learning is promoted (Jonassen et al., 2008).

In short, a course that fostered participatory and shared assessment procedures among the participants was designed, like the co-construction and sharing of assessment indicators, the promotion of communication aptitudes, as well as, the creation of a community of learners. The online course discussed in this article represents an attempt at designing an educational experience based on peer learning and peer assessment that is intended to teach teachers, in regard to not only the principal educational objective of the course (Specific Learning Disabilities), but also at a meta-level to offer basic abilities in teaching methodologies for a learner’s centered approach. The active involvement of the teachers in training became a key element in the co-construction of knowledge during the development of the course (Guile, 1998). Another area of analysis is the evaluation in online courses. MOOC providers worldwide are examining new assessment systems based on peer assessment (Teixeira de Sampayo et al., 2014). New Intelligent peer assessment systems are being studied for online training: through a social network, for example, it is possible to assess the quality of the courses and the preparation of the exams automatically. This system focuses on peer review and reputation and uses reputation as a benefit in terms of performance, compared to the average score systems.

Peer Assessment And Self-Assessment (Psa) In Adult Education

Participatory assessment (Sluijsmans, Dochy, & Moerkerke, 1999) can stimulate the development of a competency-based curriculum, instead of generating what is otherwise known as inert learning, thus favoring the education of responsible and reflective professionals.