Peer review of learning designs : Interdisciplinary SoTEL

For academics participating in graduate certificates of higher education, the advice and feedback of their teacher peers is a potentially powerful resource. This paper reports on an evaluation-in-progress of one subject in a graduate certificate for university teaching, a fully online unit on the scholarship of technology-enhanced learning (SoTEL). Two demands are made of participants in this unit: that they should develop a prototype activity using technology for learning and teaching, and that they should review and receive a review from a class peer to enhance these individual prototypes. The assumption at the heart of this unit design is that, by undertaking a review of a colleague’s learning design, the teacher learns from these additional perspectives and can then improve their own designs for learning. Challenging this assumption are multiple aspects of the context, including the relative value of design reviews from academic developers versus less experienced peers; the multiple criteria by which a design might be evaluated; and interdisciplinary work between peers. Artefacts from participants and the academic developers teaching them are analysed to probe this underlying assumption, and to consider the value of peer review in SoTEL.