About the Peer Instruction Tool#
The Peer Instruction learning system provides students with in class opportunities to discuss questions and arrive at a deeper understanding of concepts. The peer instruction tool emulates this classroom experience for the learners in an online course.
For more information about the Peer Instruction learning system, consult the Turn to Your Neighbor blog.
Assignment Overview#
Assignments created with the peer instruction tool present learners with a single select question, and then guide the learners through these stages of the exercise.
An initial response, which includes both an answer choice and a written explanation for that choice.
Review of responses submitted by several other course participants.
A final response, which also includes an answer choice and revised explanation.
Learners also receive an explanation for the correct answer choice. After 10 learners complete the assignment, class breakdown histograms show the percentage of responding learners who selected each of the answer choices, both initially and after reviewing peer responses.
Designing an Online Peer Instruction Assignment#
Before you use the peer instruction tool in Studio, you design the assignment. You prepare the assignment question and its answer choices in the same way that you would for classroom students. The question and the answer choices can include text, images, or both.
For your online learners, you also prepare the following additional elements for the exercise.
A text explanation of the correct answer choice.
An example text explanation for each answer choice.
These example explanations ensure that all learners, including the first few to attempt the assignment, have other responses to review in the second stage of the exercise. As the number of responses received from learners increases, the likelihood that your examples will be shown to any given learner decreases.
The number of responses for learners to review in the second stage of the exercise.
The logic for selecting the responses to show.
The random algorithm presents the specified number of responses without regard to the associated answer choices. The responses shown to a learner might include explanations for each of the answer choices, or it might include several explanations for one choice and none for another choice.
The simple algorithm includes an additional step to minimize repeated and missed responses for the different answer choices. Explanations are presented for as many different answer choices as possible for the number of responses specified.
After your design is complete, you use Studio to add the assignment to your course.
Note
You might consider including a Text component before the peer instruction component to describe the workflow that learners will experience in this assessment type. You might also consider including a content-specific discussion component after the peer instruction component to give learners an opportunity to continue the conversation.
Enable the Peer Instruction Tool#
Before you can add a component to your course structure for a peer instruction assignment, you must enable the peer instruction tool for your course.
To enable the peer instruction tool in Studio, you add the "ubcpi" key to
the Advanced Module List on the Advanced Settings page. Be sure to
include quotation marks around the key value. For more information, see
Enable Additional Exercises and Tools.
Note
This tool was developed and contributed to the Open edX platform by the University of British Columbia.
See also
Maintenance chart
Review Date |
Working Group Reviewer |
Release |
Test situation |