Abstract:

The New Media in Education course is the first course of its kind to be developed as part of the move to encourage entrepreneurship and innovation in the academia and promote massive open online courses. The course is designed for all teacher trainees in Israel. The course took place from 2015 until now in a college of education and technology, with the aim of training student teachers as educational entrepreneurs who combine and develop educational projects based on new media and networked pedagogy. Students in the New Media in Education MOOC were required to assess program based on new media and networked pedagogy developed by their peers, using both quantitative assessment measures and verbal feedback.

The course was inspired by the TPACK (Mishra & Koehler, 2006) model, which was used as a basis for the design of teaching and learning in the course. The innovative aspect of the course was reflected in the incorporation of the three elements of the TPACK model: technology, pedagogy, and content-knowledge, and the relations between them.

The course combines three technologies: video lessons presented on an interactive video platform, which allows learners to select the order of topics to view in each lesson; a Facebook group used for discussions that take place after each lesson; and a peer-assessment platform developed specifically for this course.

The course combines three pedagogies: individual online learning through interactive video lessons; collaborative learning through peer assessments of the initiatives developed by students; and face-to-face consultations on the design of the initiatives.

The course contents revolve around a relatively new topic — new media in education — and convey basic technological knowledge (how to operate and develop applications, games, and personal and group pages on social networks), pedagogical knowledge (Education 2.0, various teaching models), and content knowledge (such as principles of entrepreneurship, effects of the information revolution on education, disruptive innovation, etc.).

MOOC courses in the new media, entrepreneurship and innovation fields are challenging its pedagogical developers to create a clear and measureable peer assessment process of innovative plans and projects.

The current study describes and examines the existing scheme used to assess projects in the New Media in Education MOOC, and the role of innovation in these programs, with the aim of revising and improving the assessment scheme in general, and specifically the innovation assessment criteria used to assess the projects developed by future course participants.

The objectives of our action research are to study, about and from the analysis of peer assessments, how to improve the evaluation of PBL plans and its innovative aspects.

We analyzed 789 peer written assessments and grades of 89 PBL plans, which were submitted to 'New Media in Education' MOOC course.

Correlations were processed among peers final marks and other PBL plans' assessment categories. Regression analysis model indicates that compatibility of PBL plans to educational needs and its innovation are the strongest predictive factors of peers' final marks.

The research findings recommend how to improve peer assessment process and how to supply guidelines for the assessment of innovation and other categories of PBL plans, based on new media and networked pedagogy.

Keywords:

Innovation Assessment, Entrepreneurship Education, Peer Assessment in MOOCs.