IDEAS

The Project Tool in IVLE has been re-designed and enhanced with a new look and new features. It has been re-designed to reflect more accurately the intended purpose of the online application.

What is the Project Tool Peer Review System?

This tool allows students to evaluate themselves and their peers online. Evaluation questionnaires are created in the same way as IVLE quizzes and surveys. Students may work on projects individually or in groups. They can upload projects onto a group or individual workspace and collaboratively work on projects with peers and lecturers. Projects can be in the form of written assignments or websites.

The following evaluation or student assessment schemes are available:

1. Students evaluate themselves.
2. Students from one group evaluate all groups except their own group.
3. Students from one group evaluate X number of groups except their own.
4. Students evaluate each other within the same group.
5. Lecturer evaluates every group.
6. Lecturer evaluates every student in every group.
7. No evaluation scheme is set up. The Project Tool is used primarily as students’ project workspace or for the purpose of administrating the project assignment process in large classes.

For those who have used the Project Tool, the features are not new. However, users will see a more user friendly interface. An easy to use wizard now guides the user through a simple 6 steps project creation process instead of the long process found in the old Project Tool. Users will also be able to directly edit existing projects via the interface of the wizard. Confusing option buttons have been removed as all features are now streamlined into the wizard in six simple steps.

The new data report feature was carefully designed to make sure all data is reported. Lecturers can access every evaluation that is completed by students or themselves. Consolidated survey summaries are also available so that data tables can be exported to an Excel spreadsheet for further analysis.

In order to minimize reporting errors, the team has removed some question types in the Project Bank. Unlike the question banks in the Quiz and Survey sections of the IVLE, the Question Bank in the Project Bank allows lecturers to create only Multiple Choice, Likert Scale and True False questions.

History of the Project Tool in IVLE.

The idea of creating a peer review system started with Dr Jiuan Heng of the Philosophy Department, Gilles Doiron of the CDTL and Ivy Tan of the CIT in 2000. There were similar requests from lecturers from other faculties for a similar tool. There was a general need to develop a student peer review system in NUS. The IVLE team lead by Eugene Hiew was interested to create a project tool that would allow students to collaboratively work on projects online in addition to peer review capabilities. Thus, the Project Tool was developed and launched in 2001. A complex but powerful application, the tool was difficult to use. Very few lecturers used it and it was not publicized.

Over the years, lecturers have given us their feedback, the team takes these comments seriously and corrected many flaws. The new system encompasses the new suggestions. It seeks to simplify the tool, minimize errors while at the same time keeping most of the functionalities found in the old Project Tool. After 3 years, this new system promises to be “leaner and meaner”.

Why Peer to Peer Evaluation.

Peer review is a useful life skill. Students learn how to analyze and assess their friend’s work. They learn how to give praises, critique a piece of work and how to be tactful and honest when making comments. They learn how to receive praises and criticisms from peers. How their peers evaluate them may be different from how they evaluate themselves.

Grading a peer evaluation can affect the way students evaluate themselves and others. There is a high probability that students will agree amongst themselves to give only praises so that everyone scores high marks. To avoid this, Dr Tan Sor Hoon from the Department of Philosophy have suggested grading students based on the quality of the students’ critique or praise of other students’ work instead of how well a particular student or group scores in the evaluation.

Concluding Remarks

The new Project Tool is highly sophisticated in feature and design. It is the result of ideas contributed by lecturers who have used the Project Tool. At the moment, this application is unique to NUS and not replicated anywhere else in the world. We would like to thank all lecturers who have contributed suggestions making this new version possible and we hope that more lecturers will use this system and give us their feedback.