1. Peer Learning
in Online
Courses VS
Vishal Sachdev
College Of Business
@vishalsachdev
http://www.linkedin.com/i
n/vishalsachdev
Presented @The
Graduate Academy for
College Teaching at
University of Illinois.

2. Agenda
• What is Peer Learning ?
• Is it effective?
• Why should you consider it for Online Courses?
• Peer Learning and Community of Inquiry Framework
• How would you do it?
• How do I do it?

3. Peer Learning
• … students learn with and from each other without the
immediate intervention of a teacher. (Boud et al. 1999)
Boud, D., Cohen, R., & Sampson, J. (1999). Peer learning and assessment.
Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 24(4), 413–426.

4. Cooperative / Active Learning
• Cooperative Learning
• Students are in control, but Instructor specifies goals, tasks,
resources, rewards(Topping 2005)
• Peer Collaboration
• Active Learning
• Peer Tutoring
• One student takes on an explicit role of a tutor.
Topping, K. J. (2005). Trends in peer learning. Educational psychology, 25(6), 631–645.

5. Peer Learning is Effective

6. Peer Learning is effective - Offline
• Offline Study Groups
• Peer Tutoring : Benefits for both tutor and tutees (Topping
and Ehly 1998)
• Gains in transferable social and communication skills
• Increased likelihood of favorable opinions towards course
content

7. Peer learning is effective - Online
• Students feel isolated online( and Offline)
• Asynchronous communication allows for deeper, more
thoughtful discussions.
• Peer Learning allows for scaling of online courses
• Persistent storage of ideas allows for discovery of multiple
viewpoints.

8. Community of Inquiry (Garrison et al.
1999)

9. How would you do it?

10. How did I do it?
• Set the environment
• Model/Acknowledge/Train in appropriate behavior
• Assignments/Activities
• Assessment

11. Environment
• Self-presentation  Social Presence
• Ice-Breaker Activity : Eight Nouns Forum
• Wiki Profile, Linkedin /Twitter account listing
• Technology orientation
• Discussion/wikis used for activities above.
• Include effective use of technology in rubrics
• Clear Directions and Rubrics
• Rubrics help in peer assessments(more later)

12. Model appropriate behavior
• High instructor visibility in initial weeks
• Recognize and highlight exemplar work in forums
• Give feedback as a peer in initial weeks
• Train users in peer feedback/critique
• Eg: Critical Friends approach

13. Assignments/Activities
• Large Group (40-50)  Social Presence
• Ice Breakers
• Discussion on relevance of course to careers
• Can generate too much ‘noise’
• Small team(4-5)  Social Presence, Cognitive Presence
• Teams prepare Point – Counter Point positions on a topic, and then
debate between pairs of groups with opposite positions.

14. Assignments
• Medium Group (10-15)
• Seed the forum with targeted discussion questions, one for each
student.
• Individual Assignments (short writeup), become source of
discussions

15. Assessments
• Low stake activities for training
• Peer Feedback/Critique Vs Peer Assessment
•
• Assess the Process Vs the Product
• In initial Phase
• Self and Peer Assessment tool in Blackboard
• Project teams - Peer Assessments
• CATME.org

16. Informal assessments of student
engagement
• Time spent on LMS
• Number of messages
• Content analysis
• Visualizations of Forums : http://www.snappvis.org/
• Self-report surveys

17. Visualizations of Peer Engagement

18. Challenges
• Students perceive peer feedback/evaluations
• As less useful compared to instructor feedback
• As busy work, with no real learning
• Not trained to critically review content
• Might make hasty conclusions about plagiarism in peer
evaluations
• Might criticize the student, instead of critiquing the work.

19. Keep In Touch
http://vishalsachdev.com
• @vishalsachdev
• http://www.linkedin.com/in/vishalsachdev