Pedagogical strategies and technologies for peer assessment in Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

Peer assessment has been mooted as an effective strategy for scaling­-up higher education and its core values to the proportions envisaged in the idea of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs). If this is to become reality, what role will academic technologies play? What technologies will we need to provide? What learning design strategies and patterns will those technologies need to enable? This paper aims to explore the potential role of peer assessment in MOOCs, so as to get an informed sense of technology requirements. However, as will be seen, three of the four elements in the title “pedagogical strategies and technologies for peer assessment in MOOCs” vary radically for both practical and philosophical reasons, with significant implications for technology requirements. Worse still, the picture is evolving in non­linear relation to new technologies and MOOC initiatives. An overview of the various trends and differences is useful, but not conclusive. At points in the text learning design strategies, patterns and technologies are mentioned as possible ways in which peer assessment in MOOCs of various kinds might be implemented. These cases are highlighted in bold so as to stand out. They are also, in some cases, developed into simple design patterns, described in Appendix A. It should be noted, however, that they should be read within the wider pedagogical contexts within which they appear in the main body of the text