Improving the Peer Assessment Experience on MOOC Platforms

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have revolutionized higher education by offering university-like courses for a large amount of learners via the Internet. The paper at hand takes a closer look on peer assessment as a tool for delivering individualized feedback and engaging assignments to MOOC participants. Benefits, such as scalability for MOOCs and higher order learning, and challenges, such as grading accuracy and rogue reviewers, are described. Common practices and the state-of-the-art to counteract challenges are highlighted. Based on this research, the paper at hand describes a peer assessment workflow and its implementation on the openHPI and openSAP MOOC platforms. This workflow combines the best practices of existing peer assessment tools and introduces some small but crucial improvements.