Getting runs on the board with student group work The affordances of Online Peer Evaluation tools

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) Introduction

 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 Why Use Group Projects?

UNSW Graduate Attributes

 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 Group work: common 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 Strategies to manage challenges

The problem of group grading: Online Peer Evaluation tools

1Create a rubric (assessment criteria and standards) for students to use 2Create an assessment and schedule its opening and closing times 3Towards 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 4From these self-assessment marks, each student gets a peer-assessment weighting, e.g The weighting is multiplied by the group mark to produce each student's final grade for the group project 6Optionally students can login and review their anonymous feedback Online Peer Evaluation: How It Works

 Group projects are common  Diverse international student body  “SPARK PLUS”  “WebPA”SPARK PLUSWebPA Case Study: Trialling a New Tool at Mining UNSW

Problems: o Complicated interface o No integration with LMS: no SSO, manual user enrolment, manual grading o Time-consuming and fiddly SPARK PLUS

Advantages: Integrated with the UNSW LMS (Moodle): SSO, automatic enrolment & grade publishing More intuitive interface Open source software: can be customised locally WebPA

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