Education Commons^™

Tipping The Balance Towards 21st Century Skills Through Peer-To-Peer Learning: A Cross-Disciplinary Pilot Of Peer Review Software, John Mccormick, Lisa Spitz, Liv Cummins

Staff Scholarship

There is growing recognition that many college students enter the workplace lacking “21st Century Skills” such as critical thinking, collaboration and communication. Peer-to-peer feedback provides a large number of benefits, including these “lifelong learning” skills valued by industry. Peer review, however, poses many challenges: for instructors; these include management of the process and poor quality of peer feedback; and for students, socioemotional barriers. Key socioemotional challenges are learners’ lack of trust in the process, in their peers, and in themselves as reviewers. This paper describes a pilot of a web-based peer review software called “Peergrade”, which was found highly effective …

Tipping The Balance Towards 21st Century Skills Through Peer-To-Peer Learning: A Cross-Disciplinary Pilot Of Peer Review Software, John Mccormick, Liv Cummins, Lisa Spitz

Staff Scholarship

There is growing recognition that many college students enter the workplace lacking “21st Century Skills” such as critical thinking, collaboration and communication. Peer-to-peer feedback provides a large number of benefits, including these “lifelong learning” skills valued by industry. Peer review, however, poses many challenges: for instructors; these include management of the process and poor quality of peer feedback; and for students, socioemotional barriers. Key socioemotional challenges are learners’ lack of trust in the process, in their peers, and in themselves as reviewers. This paper describes a pilot of a web-based peer review software called “Peergrade”, which was found highly effective …

2018 Annual Report, Hedi Benaicha

Library Reports

Lesley University Library's 2018 Annual Report, A Culture of Engagement: Our Students, Faculty and Staff within the Larger Community, provides an overview of the Library's focus on strengthening its central role within the university. The report outlines what was done during the 2017-2018 academic year to achieve the Library's vision of building community, providing easy access to knowledge and information, preserving the institutional memory, and becoming an innovation center.

The 2018 Annual Report begins with an executive summary by the Dean of Libraries and documents the Library's achievements and goals for the 2018-2019 academic year. This is followed by …

Digitalcommons@Lesley Quarterly Report & Impact Infographic - December 2017, Philip M. Siblo-Landsman

Library Reports

Lesley University's institutional repository (IR) continues to grow since it's launch in May 2017. This report discusses the addition of new collections including the migration of an academic journal, and the addition of two conferences. It also discusses the outreach efforts of the digital team and comments on the download metrics and how they indicate the demographics of users accessing Lesley scholarly and creative works. An infographic is included to provide a visual report of these metrics and to highlight the impact of Lesley scholarship.

Visualizing Interaction: Pilot Investigation Of A Discourse Analytics Tool For Online Discussion, John Mccormick

Staff Scholarship

Discussion boards are perhaps the most commonly used collaboration tool in online courses. However, native discussion tools in learning management systems are limited in their ability to show interaction patterns among learners. Tools that provide more robust visual representations of discussions can improve instructors’ understanding of how students are interacting and, as a result, their ability to intervene when identifying suboptimal interaction patterns. This paper presents an exploratory investigation of one such tool, Social Networks Adapting Pedagogical Practice (SNAPP), examining its potential to help faculty understand and react to discussion patterns. Emerging learning analytics tools such as SNAPP can enhance …