Project Background
This is a collaborative project 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), building 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.
The 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. 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:
- Encourage and raise awareness and practice of the scholarship of online learning and teaching, and the collection of evidence for promotion purposes by academic teaching staff who use the online environment to support learning.
- Assemble comprehensive online learning and teaching standards based on research with associated nationally agreed on criteria that can be used to guide academic staff who are not skilled in the development and practice of online learning and teaching.
- Affirm the work of academics in the area and provide a highly practical approach to peer review of online learning and teaching, which is accessible to a broadly-based audience.
- Locate responsibility for the quality of learning and teaching with academic staff and guide them in the development or redevelopment of their own courses through reflective processes, and use these same criteria to have their work evaluated.
- Facilitate “just-in-time” academic staff development by providing the accepted standards, information about how to meet these and examples of how this can be achieved within the one Web-enabled peer review tool.
- Support academic staff in the development of their courses by encoding the elements of good practice in an agreed checklist for online learning and teaching.
- Provide a comprehensive, integrated open source peer review system 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 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.