Abstract:

Peer teaching is an approach where students teach subject content to each other in addition or instead of teachers or lecturers. Peers teaching content to others originates back to Aristotele’s times, and it has been used and researched on many occasions since then. Elements of peers teaching each other can be seen also in other methods of learning, as for example flipped learning and tutoring have traits of peer teaching. Peer teaching and its’ applications have proven to have many benefits: it supports the learning of both parties involved and it allows more time to be dedicated to applying the content, instead of lecturing it. As peers participating usually share the same discourse, it can be easier to understand even more challenging learning contents.

The purpose of this paper is to share an example of how peer teaching can be used to increase both academic results and overall satisfaction of the learners. In this paper, we describe how we have been implementing peer teaching with students at the university of applied sciences while they are learning bookkeeping in an online course. To provide more support for students not majoring in finance and accounting, we have asked students that are at the early stage of their majoring studies in accounting to help them with their assignments and teach them the basics of bookkeeping.

The results of this peer teaching have been very promising. The academic results of students participating in peer teaching activities have improved when compared to those groups that did not participate in peer teaching activities. Not only did those receiving teaching from peers perform better, but also those teaching others reached a better understanding of the basics of the subject in matter. In addition to that, the overall feedback of the bookkeeping online course has been better since we introduced peer teaching.

Keywords:

Peer teaching, course development, higher education, collaborative learning.