Transcript Slide 1
Getting runs on the board with
student group work
The affordances of Online Peer Evaluation tools
Introduction
• Tim Allen (no relation to the Tool Man)
• Educational Developer at the School of Mining
UNSW
• Career Highlights:
• 5 years at the Learning and Teaching
units at Macquarie and UNSW
• ESL/EFL teacher in Sydney and Asia for
10 years
• Education: MAppLing(TESOL), BLitt (English),
BBSc (Psych)
Why Use Group Projects?
Peer teaching – students learn from each other
Develop important interpersonal skills:
cooperation, communication, leadership, negotiation,
conflict resolution, etc.
Student-centred learning: taking more
responsibility
Passive knowledge is activated by testing it
against other’s understandings and collaborative
activities
To prepare them for skills and qualities required in
their future careers and lives
UNSW Graduate Attributes
Group work: common challenges
Students don't understand what they should do
even after it has been explained
Students complain about their groups or make
groups with their friends only
Some groups are very active
and cooperative while some are very passive and
quiet
Difficult for the instructor to know what is really
happening within the group
Students complain about their group members'
effort
Students complain that their group grade is
unfair they are being penalised by weaker team
members
Strategies to manage challenges
Provide a handout with an overview
schedule and detailed instructions
Require students to hand in a project plan
and regular progress reports
Explain why group work is important and
point out learning objectives and graduate
attributes
Try to resolve interpersonal problems quickly
Explain the grading rationale and method
The problem of group grading:
Online Peer Evaluation tools
Online Peer Evaluation: How It
Works
1 Create a rubric (assessment criteria and standards)
for students to use
2 Create an assessment and schedule its opening and
closing times
3 Towards the end of the project, students login and
anonymously peer-assess and (optionally) self-assess
each other; the teacher also gives each group a mark
4 From these self-assessment marks, each student
gets a peer-assessment weighting, e.g. 1.1
5 The weighting is multiplied by the group mark to
produce each student's final grade for the group project
6 Optionally students can login and review their
anonymous feedback
Case Study: Trialling a New Tool at
Mining UNSW
Group projects are common
Diverse international student body
“SPARK PLUS” “WebPA”
SPARK PLUS
Problems:
o Complicated
interface
o No integration with
LMS: no SSO,
manual user
enrolment, manual
grading
o Time-consuming
and fiddly
WebPA
Advantages:
• Integrated with the
UNSW LMS (Moodle):
SSO, automatic
enrolment & grade
publishing
• More intuitive
interface
• Open source
software: can be
customised locally
Q&A