Designing Scalable and Sustainable Peer Interactions Online

When students work with peers, they learn more actively, build richer knowledge structures, and connect material to their lives. However, not every peer learning experience online sees successful adoption. This chapter first introduces PeerStudio, an assessment platform that leverages the large number of students’ peers in online classes to enable rapid feedback on in-progress work. Students submit their draft, give rubric-based feedback on two peers’ drafts, and then receive peer feedback. Students can integrate the feedback and repeat this process as often as they desire. PeerStudio demonstrates how rapid feedback on in-progress work improves course outcomes. We then articulate and address three adoption and implementation challenges for peer learning platforms such as PeerStudio. First, peer interactions struggle to bootstrap critical mass. However, class incentives can signal importance and spur initial usage. Second, online classes have limited peer visibility and awareness, so students often feel alone even when surrounded by peers. We find that highlighting interdependence and strengthening norms can mitigate this issue. Third, teachers can readily access “big” aggregate data but not “thick” contextual data that helps build intuitions, so software should guide teachers’ scaffolding of peer interactions. We illustrate these challenges through studying 8500 students’ usage of PeerStudio and another peer learning platform: Talkabout. Efficacy is measured through sign-up and participation rates and the structure and duration of student interactions. This research demonstrates how large classes can leverage their scale to encourage mastery through rapid feedback and revision, and suggests secret ingredients to make such peer interactions sustainable at scale.