The issue with peer reviewed assignments
Does this phenomenon take MOOCs down from their academic level?
Right, teaching a massive open online course, or: a MOOC, can be an overwhelming task. Not that I have experience from the teaching side of MOOCs, but I can just imagine how daunting it must be. Imagine you’re used to interacting in classes of, say, 10 students, or maybe, in big lecture halls around the world, you regularly address about a thousand students. You think of bringing your course online, record a bit of video, post links to articles and other interesting materials, modify the tests and assignments you have, and then put all that in a catalog of one of the MOOC providers. Suddenly thirty, forty, maybe even fifty thousand students are enrolling in your class. The work for the video’s remains the same, and fortunately there’s a method for letting computers evaluate tests. But what about writing assignments? You want your students to write essays, but you simply can’t review all of them, now can you?
In comes peer reviewing. Why not let the students assist you in the work and let them review each other? It’s one of the few ways, if not the only way, to make such a MOOC work. However, some would probably say that, well, students are not teachers for a reason: they do not master the subject matter (yet). And if they do not have a full grasp of what is being taught (again, ‘yet’), how can their review of a peer carry any weight?
Fear of a learning planet
As said above, I am not a teacher of MOOCs. But, I am a student in a couple of them. To be honest, the first time I had to submit an assignment for this peer review process, I was a bit anxious. Would I be understood? Would I be assessed fairly? Would... ah, well, you maybe know what I mean. Basically, I was afraid that students from all over the planet would not assess my work properly. But here’s the first thing I learned about why this peer review system actually could work: we not only had an assignment, we also had very clear guidelines on how to assess the work of our peers. This really helped. Not only in knowing how to evaluate the work of others, but also in the sense that your work is being evaluated fairly.
The second thing I learned about why peer reviews work, is that there is power in numbers. Sure, there could be a peer that has a bad day, bad mood, bad temper, but that negative look on life (or: the other way around, someone who is overly positive), will be evened out by others. The average of the reviews will be a fairly accurate assessment of the quality of your work.
Then there is a thing called reciprocal altruism. There’s a lot to say about that, but in this context it will lead to students giving a fair assessment of their peers, so that they have a higher chance of receiving a fair assessment themselves. If not now, than in the second round.
In short, the forces of clear guidelines, averaging out extreme grades and reciprocal altruism make that my fear of being graded unfairly has largely gone away.
Learning accelerator
But there’s more. Having to write an essay, or a few, during a course, greatly enhances the depth of learning. Because your peers are grading you, you need to be extra clear, but also want to be extra careful with quoting sources and supporting claims you make with proper references. To do that, you often need to look beyond what’s being taught in the video lectures or readings.
To top it all off, reading the work of others, especially if they’ve done a great job, will teach you about their view on the subject matter, and give you different perspectives on it. In that way, the peer reviewed assignments are a double learning accelerator.
Try first, judge later
This leads me to the conclusion that the fear I had for peer reviews, and the idea that it was an ‘issue’ was based on unfamiliarity with the phenomenon. Just as with MOOCs themselves, and basically any form of innovation or change, it proved best to experiment with and experience the phenomenon, to get a better understanding. Is peer review open for improvements? Undoubtedly. But that’s food for another post.
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