Method to democratic peer assessment in Participative design education for the Virtual ecosystem

Abstract

Enabling students of varied strata of the society access to quality education has remained a challenge in a physical classroom, as it is expensive and cheaper to deliver them online in bulk. The evolution of massive open online classes (MOOCs) has greatly widened the scope for access to education, where thousands of students, enroll and participate remotely and asynchronously, multiplying the challenges of imparting education online. newlineDesign is a domain learnt by practice. Quality feedback is crucial to creativity and learning, yet rare. The method of feedback to design students is individual and specific, making it challenging to provide in large online classes. Peer and self-assessment opens opportunities to scale assessments in online classrooms. Peer review entrusts young learners to take on the role of an evaluator, though they lack expertise and perspective. newlineThis dissertation reports our experiences of developing and testing AsPeer and TriGrade, an integrated peer assessment system, built based on theories of learning through contrasting cases for effective peer review. This platform was put to test across four courses, with two iterations of a university online class. We observed that peer grades highly correlated with staff assigned grades. Students aided by feedback on grading bias were mindful and performed grading with better accuracy. Simplified guiding questions improved accuracy in assessment by 89% students. We provided them with feedback snippets that encouraged peers to provide personalized qualitative feedback along with rating. Students responded that the snippets helped them look at submissions critically. Learners spent more time in the review process and responded with longer and insightful feedback. The results demonstrate that comparative assessment helps reviewers give better feedback on peer work and helps reflect on their own work better. newlinePlatforms like these and other systems developed for large-scale evaluations and interaction, direct us to a future where online classes shall depend