Streamlining Peer Evaluation in Large Classes

Peer evaluation is a powerful pedagogical tool to help students learn and improve teamwork skills that are essential to succeed in their future career. However, implementing peer evaluation in a classroom setting, especially... [ view full abstract ]

Peer evaluation is a powerful pedagogical tool to help students learn and improve teamwork skills that are essential to succeed in their future career. However, implementing peer evaluation in a classroom setting, especially in large classes, is difficult both due to pedagogical and technical challenges such as grouping students, asking valid and reliable questions, anonymous evaluation, result-management and integration with the Learning Management System (LMS). This presentation will introduce how the Alberta School of Business transitioned from an old in-house developed peer evaluation system to an open source peer evaluation system developed by UBC, to accommodate the needs of large classes of over 500 students. We will show the audience how iPeer saves the institution time and resources as well as improving user satisfaction by presenting how it integrates with the LMS and streamlines the peer evaluation workflow through:

- Effective group creation
- Flexible evaluation design
- Easy completion and submission of evaluations
- Powerful collection, analysis and release of evaluation results
- Convenient records keeping and retrieval

We will also share our best practices, recommendations and lessons learned from our first year of piloting iPeer. After the presentation, the audience will gain a deeper understanding of online peer evaluation and how it can benefit teaching and learning.