Proposal

The Rationale for and Aims of the Project

This is a collaborative proposal by the University of South Australia, Queensland University of Technology, RMIT, Edith Cowan, Monash and Griffith Universities, the University of Tasmania, the University of Southern Queensland and Lancaster University (UK). It builds on extensive work that has been undertaken both within Australia and overseas in the development of peer review of online learning and teaching, which supports and stimulates the scholarship of online learning and teaching. It has the capacity to demonstrate quality learning and teaching through course development, evaluation, improvement and interactive learning. Evidence produced through such quality processes can be used by academic staff as evidence to support claims for recognition and reward; a process which is required as an indicator against which Australian universities report via the Australian government’s Learning and teaching performance fund.

The proposed project addresses an identified need for a comprehensive, integrated Web-enabled peer review system that guides academic staff in the development or redevelopment of their own courses through reflective processes, and uses these same criteria to have their work evaluated. An extensive review of the literature and a range of peer review tools published over the last six years (see Attachment 1) identifies various approaches that have been developed to both identify and validate evaluation indicators designed to measure the intended outcome of online courses (e.g. Seok et al., 2006), several focusing on the development of theoretical frameworks that can be applied to the evaluation of online learning and teaching materials (Barbera, 2004; Franklin et al., 2004; Chua and Lam, 2007), and others that have focused on the development of instruments that take a quantitative approach to the evaluation of courses according to specified criteria. None of the approaches reviewed provide a fully integrated peer review system in an accessible format that enables staff to record their achievements in online learning and teaching, and to use that information in support of their applications for academic promotion.

The project aims are to build on the knowledge gained from existing approaches to peer review of online learning and teaching to develop an open source, Web-enabled peer review tool and to deliver the benefits of this project to the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) members through the numerous networks involved in this project. The project complements and contributes to the work of the project team “Embedding peer review of learning and teaching in e-learning and blended learning environments” led by Dr Jo McKenzie from the University of Technology, Sydney, which proposes to develop a scholarly framework, processes and resources for peer review in e-learning and blended environments.

The specific objectives are as follows:

The distinctive component of this project is its focus on developing, trialing and evaluating a research-based, Web-enabled tool for peer review of online learning and teaching, based on an existing prototype that has been developed and trialed at the University of South Australia (George, Wood and Wache, 2004). The tool will incorporate banks of standards-based criteria for use in peer review, explanations of the meaning of these criteria, exemplars and an underlying database that can record peer review results and make them available for promotion purposes. It will be open source, to enable it to be adapted by other institutions to suit their learning and teaching and technical contexts. The project will also develop case studies of peer review using the tool. The project team has specific expertise in standards for and accessibility of online courses and learning and teaching and the design of online systems.

The project contributes to the project led by Dr McKenzie, which focuses on developing systemic institutional capacity for conducting peer review in blended learning environments, by developing a comprehensive, integrated Web-enabled peer review tool that can be incorporated into the framework developed by the McKenzie project team. The project led by Dr McKenzie will contribute to the development of the tool by extending its scope to include standards-based and qualitative criteria relating to learning and teaching in blended learning environments.

While the two projects have distinctive approaches and deliverables, which individually will result in significant outcomes that address the ALTC's priority of developing and modeling systems of peer review of learning and teaching and embedding peer review in higher education promotion systems, they also complement each other in the following ways (see also Attachment 9):

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