Peer Reviews

We have arrived at the point in the course where you will have substantially completed your Interactive Learning Resource as a draft and will be making it available for your colleagues in the class. During this week, each of you will act as beta testers for other groups’ resources. You will work through the resource as a learner and make notes for the group who created the resource so that they may improve the design of their resource prior to submitting it. This week is an opportunity for you to provide some substantive formative feedback. The feedback that you provide will be used by the other group as they refine their Interactive Learning Resources next week, and you will share a link to your feedback with your instructor as 15% of  your final grade.

Your review will NOT be considered as part of your peers’ grades.

Logistics

If you received instructions from your instructor regarding who will review your work, please follow those, or…

If you have not already done so, please sign up to peer review the work of another pod on our Learning Pod sign-up Sheet. If you are having any difficulty with this, please email your instructor as soon as possible. 

Each Learning Pod is responsible for ensuring that all reviewers receive a copy of the resource. The easiest way to do this is by providing a link in the column next to your Pod Number, making this a self-serve system. PLEASE ensure that your links are accessible to reviewers and not set to private.

Complete your review as a post on your own blog. You must include a link to the resource that you reviewed. Please send the link to your post to each individual in the group who authored the resource you reviewed. 

Your review may be a typed blog post, or you might want to record a screencast walk-through of the resource or some other technology tool that you’d like to try.

Notes on Collegiality

Your task in this process is to help your colleagues improve their learning resources. Please ensure that you focus your feedback on  structure their resource as related to each of the topics that we covered in class. Your task is not to criticize the content that your colleagues have chosen as their topic. This means that you don’t need to be an expert in the content area of the resource in order to help your colleagues improve their resource.

Your notes and critique should focus on aspects of the resource that will be assessed (appropriate outcomes, alignment, interactivity, inclusivity, technology use and rationale, presentation, grammar, spelling, citations, etc.), and it must be constructive. Do not simply say that ‘X’ is a pre-structural response; offer collegial suggestions for improvement.

A good way to ensure that you are being collegial is to ask questions in your review, like the following:

  • Do you have an assessment linked to this outcome?

  • Do you need to cite this idea?

  • In what way is this activity interactive?

You can also use language that indicates that your criticism is tentative and may be a misunderstanding:

  • It seems to me that…

  • I might have missed something…

  • Correct me if I’m wrong…

  • Perhaps you might consider…

If English is your first language, don’t feel that you need to correct every little detail of English grammar. Some of your colleagues are writing in their second or third language. This is not a course in English grammar and writing. If there is a section that really doesn’t make sense, you can suggest that they seek assistance with making it more clear, but if the idea is communicated, even if a little awkwardly, then that is fine.

Reviews that criticize the people that created the resource will not be considered for grades.