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