Reflecting on Peer Reflection in a Massive, Open, Online Environment

It is immensely difficult to create a massive open online course in the humanities and social sciences that approximates a traditional brick-and-mortar offering.  This should come as no surprise given that all three major MOOCs platforms have their origin in computer science departments.

MOOCs emerged from the sciences because the sciences are scalable.  They’re scalable on campus and they are scalable beyond campus.  The core forms of STEM assessments translate well to MOOCs.  The humanities and social sciences, however, resist machine grading.  Writing—synthetic expressions of the complexity of histories, societies, cultures, and creative works—rests at the center of evaluation in almost every single discipline and interdiscipline in the humanities and social sciences. 

When grading is left to students, the results are mixed.  So, for History of the Slave South, rather than make our MOOC students into an army of pseudo-experts or TA proxies, we’ve tried to make their feedback more useful than judgmental.  We’ve stopped calling it peer review or peer grading and, instead, termed it “peer reflection.”  We want these reflections to act as a mirror to their peers.  We want our writers to view their peers’ reflections as a way to see if they accomplished what they set out to accomplish.  We significantly tempered the grading of our writing assignments so that it is now simply an “unsatisfactory,” “satisfactory,” “accomplished” scale.  It is our hope that a peer reflection system based in description will create a more useful experience for our learners.

Note: Since this is a teaching practicum session, I will not be reading a paper, but I will be guiding a conversation with the audience through our instructions, our quantitative data, and students’ qualitative feedback as well as our theoretical foundation—the pedagogies of Jacques Ranciere, Joseph Jacotot, and the Ohio State Writing Center.