Peer Grading and effective peer grading
an active MOOC student perspective
It has been 2 years since I first began to do MOOC, (HCI by Prof Scott Klemmer in 2012 was my first). It is about learning, learning with self-discipline. Most of the time an assessment of a MOOC course is an aggregate of Quizzes + Assignments. But some cases evaluated by some team base projects as well.
Often courses in MOOC required peer grading, where it will decide the final grade even in the signature track in Coursera. Peer grading is a challenging task, at least for an active learner. It consumes time an effort if you consider providing and effective review in return.
In MOOC courses many of learners are passionate to learn from each other as well. In my case as a very active participant in 5-6 MOOC platforms, I found myself better satisfied with NovoEd platform peer reviewing process.
When an assignment given, I would like to know how others have come up with their answers.
MOOCs allow grading the peers, which will give me a chance to observe what others have done. Only limited in Coursera as only 3- may be 6 or less peer grading is required and sometimes depend on the course the review is necessary but not compulsory. Often you never know who graded your assignment and on what basis the marks ect because some students focus on personal perspective than rubric or in some cases there is no proper rubric to validate..
But grading process in NovoEd, I found it is very effective and meets the objective of an active learner.
1. It (rendered in such a manner )gives the submissions of the whole class, and trendy submissions which has most student attractions are being push on top of the page.
I get to see many creative ideas and it is very effective to learn more from those. More to that we even can contact the people who made the submission where we can ask more details. I did that when I need to know how to create an animation using the new tool PowToon. I saw a beautiful creation in the submission and then I contacted the person , they always love to share.
2. When you are submitting you assignment , there is someone accountable for your grades. This means we get to see the people who review our assignment, which make me realize that when I do the same I will be accountable as well.
I often try to put a constructive feedback as it will helpful to the peer as well as I like the helpful votes count. It is motivating the active users I suppose.
For example this screen shot says who are the people evaluated my submission and their ideas of what they like, what they don’t like, things we can improve and finally new ideas we didn’t try. Which is very helpful in learning process.
If you submit great inputs to the review, of course you will end up having more helpful votes which is very satisfying for an active user.
Not forgetting the Coursera , specially the HCI course offered from Prof.Scot Klemmer, often equip with advance peer grading processors. The idea is to provide a fair grading to everyone. But it doesn’t count the review.
As an active learner you always tent to learn from each other, you look for people who give you good feedback, where it is always helpful to trace them back and get more ideas later.
So my personal perspective of an effective peer grading is —
• A visible peer which accountable for grading,
• A peer review, which lead us to learn and earn more ideas by tracing back the peer who provided the best review.
• A review which leads us network with opportunities, its about learning from each other , unless you don’t see personal entity , social collaboration is impossible.
• The idea of my MOOCing is not only to learn but to learn to learn from others A platform which caters to an active learner is the platform which will produce best outcomes. The world is about learning from each other.
