Abstract:

Current educational approaches are focused on putting the student in the center of the teaching-learning process. This not only implies that the student has to take a more active role in the teaching-learning process, but also that the lecturer has to be more involved in that process to provide a continuous assessment. This involvement can be challenging for the lecturer to be properly addressed, especially for those subjects which have a large number of students, putting in risk a proper implementation of active learning processes and reducing the engagement and motivation of students.

Considering this situation, we have worked on the implementation of peer-assessment tasks where the students have to iteratively propose, review and select “multiple choice” questions related with the content that has been taught in the subject. Then, those selected questions will feed a battery that will be used to randomly create an online exam that will be done by the students themselves. In this way, the students actively work on the content from the subject and on the assessment of their understanding. These peer-assessment tasks have been implemented using the Sakai-based e-learning platform from our institution (PoliformaT platform from the Universitat Politècnica de València) in combination with several self-made software functions created to automatically process the contributions from the students. This allows implementing the peer-assessment tasks with minimal intervention from the lecturer independently on the number of students participating in the subject.

According to the feedback obtained from the students, they consider that their engagement and motivation in the subject has increased by implementing these peer-assessment tasks. Additionally, a great majority of the students indicates that the innovation is useful for keeping up with the subject and to gain a deeper knowledge on the content. From the lecturer side, we have confirmed that the tasks can be easily implemented in a quasi-autonomous way even for groups close to 100 students.

Keywords:

Peer-assessment, formative assessment, e-learning, Sakai, active learning.