Nicola Wilkinson developed WebPA to address criticisms of traditional group assessments. WebPA allows students to peer assess individual contributions to group work, resulting in adjusted marks. Students are randomly assigned to groups and complete a group task. They then assess themselves and group members on criteria like cooperation, communication, and contribution. Evaluations from Dr. Pond, Dr. Robinson, Alan Curtis, and Dr. Cherry indicate WebPA provides honest assessments that improve student satisfaction with group work evaluations.
1. Nicola Wilkinson … enables every team member to recognise individual contributions to group work
2. A well known criticism of assessed group work is that each student receives the same team mark, regardless of individual performance
3. By using WebPA to peer assess group work, each student received an adjusted mark Marked by students, the people that know!
4. Each person has been randomly allocated a name from a TV programme. There are 4-5 people in each group Find the other members of your group… Group Formation
5. As a group, produce a poster on the paper provided based on the following question… What enhances the student learning experience? You have 20 minutes… Group Task
9. “ Overall, marking is honest and credible” Dr Keith Pond Business School Loughborough University Dr Carol Robinson Assistant Director (Teaching and Learning) Mathematics Education Centre Loughborough University “ Students are much more satisfied – complaints have almost disappeared.”
10. “ Some of the best modules during my Engineering degree were group based modules. The combination of the team working and the peer assessment was a great introduction to working in a team within industry.” Alan Curtis Research Engineer JCB Power Systems Ltd
11. "WebPA is now embedded in our first year and will be for the next five years. Typically 180-200 students will be subjected to.. [WebPA] ..every year." Dr Bob Cherry Manchester Metropolitan University “ We are impressed with the success of the WebPA project and the impact on group work in higher education.” David Kernohan Programme Manager eLearning Team JISC
The WebPA project has been funded under the JISC: e-Learning Capital Programme. The life time of the project for the funded period is October 2006 to March 2009. However, as the project has been made open source the life time of the project is expected to continue after the funding period has ended. As identified by the project, the main aims have been to; Enhancement the online peer assessment system “WebPA” Provide a mature open source peer assessment system “WebPA OS” Sep’08 Disseminate models of pedagogic use Advance the service oriented approach for application development within the JISC e-Learning Framework All of which the project team have been able to achieve and more as well. The aim of the WebPA tool is to provide a mechanism through which the system …enables every team member to recognise an individuals contributions to the group work. Really we are talking about a peer moderated marking system for group work. WebPA was originally intended to measure the process of what occurs in group work out-side none contact time with the tutors. And allow the students to provide input into the assessment process to provide fairer individual marks for each group/ team member. However, there are no reasons why the tool can not be used to measure product as well. This is one of the real benefits of the tool, it is flexible enough to allow academic tutors to look at product or process through formative or summative assessment, from the groups (students) perspective.
