Friday, March 13, 2009

ACRL 2009 - Peer to peer teaching/evaluating

I absolutely adore teaching online and am constantly on the lookout for strategies, methodologies and structures to enable my students to have the best learning experience possible there.

While this session was geared towards library instruction by librarians for students at the University of Alberta in a face to face setting, I wonder about the possibilities of implementing colleague peer-review teaching/observing relationships for online education and the valuable feedback that could be obtained by it.

Some teasers from my notes:

  • Why experiment with peer to peer research process? A desire to share love of subject matter that shares your passion and enthusiasm, improve and enhance skills, overcome ‘silo-ization’ to talk and learn from one another
  • Used a 3-step approach of Preparation, Observation phase, Closing phase
  • Challenges of teacher: being observed by peers made them extremely nervous. Ironic since same academics ok with peer review of their research but threatened by having a peer in the classroom (paraphrase of Washer, 2006)

This also introduced me to skrbl, which I had not heard of before and want to check out later!

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

It was nice to read your notes on our session. One thing that we didn't get into much detail is our experience with online p2p observation. Virginia did observe/lurk in one of my virtual sessions on RefWorks to a bunch of MA students. We did amend our observation protocol accordingly and while Virginia observed it "live", the session was being recorded and she could have viewed it whenever it was more convenient for her. I truly believe that this area of e-learning peer support needs to be further developed; lots of interesting ideas there. Let me know if you hear/read of anything or if you start your own project. Cheers from Canada!