Faculty
Engineering & Science
School
Science & Informatics
Department
Physical Sciences
Team Members
- Dr Eileen O’ Leary
- Dr Elaine O'Keeffe
- Ms Laura Crow
Objectives
- To develop students independent learning by involving them as co-creators of their own assessment questions, detailed solutions & peer to peer feedback.
- To develop students ‘confidence, written communication skills and ‘soft skills’ by encouraging engagement and offering them support and guidance on how to give and receive peer-feedback.
- To provide a platform for all learner levels, where high achieving students can challenge themselves and students new to the subject can learn at their own pace in a safe anonymous environment.
- To enhance the skills and expand the network of Department staff through the sharing of knowledge and working in unity with external collaborators from DIT & AIT.
Progress to date
- A student survey was conducted to assess students’ attitudes to the introduction of PeerWise.
- The initial survey of students prior to the commencement of the project found:
- Students were generally concerned about:
- Making mistakes,
- Looking foolish,
- Their own IT skills
- Their ability to create good content
- The quality of the questions and answers created by other students
- Thinking of questions
- Students were looking forward to
- Improving their grades
- Having a better understanding of the material they were covering
- Having a new/different resource for studying
- Community help aspect
- Self-help aspect
- Having an easier way to revise
- Seeing what other students would create
- Having lots of practice questions
- Self-test aspect
- Dr Barry Ryan, DIT, ran a workshop for 1st year CIT Physical Sciences & Biological Chemistry students which introduced them to PeerWise and advised how to write good quality multiple choice questions.
- Dr Barry Ryan, DIT, ran a workshop for CIT staff which introduced them to PeerWise and advised them how to set up a class group on PeerWise and how to manage/monitor student submissions.
- PeerWise was rolled out to all 1st year CIT Physical Sciences & Biological Chemistry students
- The first Inter-institutional collaboration site on PeerWise involving CIT, AIT and DITcalled ACCESS was created.
- A sample of student comments so far has shown students are engaging, reflecting and recognising their own knowledge gaps.
- The following resources have been developed:
- ‘Getting started with PeerWise’ Presentation for Students & Staff
- How to create ‘good’ MCQ questions
- How to enroll students on PeerWise and avoid GDPR issues
- Tips on how to monitor student contributions
- PeerWise is now also being used by Dr Anna Dynan in Accounting & Information Systems
