A Systematic Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis of Participants’ Opinions on Peer Assessment in Surveys and Course Forum Discussions of MOOCs

Peer assessment has become a regular feature of many MOOC 1 platforms and also has potential for other contexts where learning and teaching are required to scale because of growing numbers of students. Where manual grading is not possible due to the large number of submissions and the tasks to be assessed are to complex or open-ended to be assessed by machines, peer assessment offers a valuable alternative. However, particularly in the context of MOOCS, courses featuring peer assessments often have lower completion rates. Furthermore, participants with negative expectations and opinions about this form of assessment are generally ‘louder’ in their communication with the teaching teams than their counterparts who respond more positively. We have, therefore, set out to establish a broader understanding how the participants perceive the appropriateness and effectiveness of peer assessed tasks, and the quality of the received reviews on the X1, X2, and X3 2 MOOC platforms. For this purpose, we have conducted post-course surveys in a large number of courses that included peer assessments. Additionally, we analyzed the discussions in the forums of these courses as the post-course surveys often are biased due to the low proportion of unsuccessful participants that are still around at the end of a course. 1 Massive Open Online Course 2 The platforms’ names have been obscured for double-blind review