CELT | Good Practice Exchange
Developing a Peer-to-Peer Support Tool:
Michael Fernando: My name is Michael Fernando; I am a principal lecturer in the School of Engineering. Part of my role is being a programme leader for all of our undergrad programmes.
In June 2016 Michael went to the CARPE summer school in Turku to look into the pedagogy of learning. It was here that he started to think about co-designing and co-learning curriculums.
The one thing that stayed with me in the 4 days was if the students feel that they own what they are studying or the sense of ownership in what they are learning that will enable them to be an active participant in the co-learning and co-designing process. So that's a summary of what I got out of it.
Back in Manchester, Michael resumed his role as programme leader.
When I was designing my curriculum for this year we had a new co-unit being introduced this year to our electrical and electronics engineers. The unit is called Electronic Engineering Design.
Running a new unit doesn’t always go to plan.
The ISS for the first term came back and we had issues for this unit because it's a new unit we had loads of resources issues in terms of getting industrial specialist software and the delivery was done by two new academics. They did an excellent job with what they had but the student experience wasn't there and we had a very poor result. I was saying to myself, I was thinking about my delivery for next term because I was going to teach from January onwards, “Well the unit went through a tough time, there's nothing I can do to make it any worse but I do know that I can be bold in trying something out.” I thought “Ooh what about the thing I came up with a summary for in Turku: if the student feels that they own the unit then they are willing to contribute to the curriculum.” So the first lesson I went to I said “right I want to do something”. I was very honest; I published the ISS data with them and I said “right, I'm sorry that this has happened but let's make the best use of what we have for the next three months. What about a tool that will help to do that?” That's where this peer-to-peer support tool comes in.
What we said was we'll do an example question in the lecturer. Understand that this is a Level 6 unit, high-level industry standard thing. So we will tackle examples for that particular class but after the lecture each of the students take ownership of that example. So example 1.1, for example, will be done by John Smith and he would go away and he will work with me that whole week to produce the summary solution for that example and he will send it to me. My job as the unit leader is to check his working and if I'm happy with that and I think that it's good I will post it on to Moodle.
This means that one student, we had a class of 40, we had about 10 lectures during that time, 2 hour lectures and we had many examples, each one took a turn to do one example. From the students' point of view, they do one, but the benefit is that they get 40 examples already done for them and that's fantastic for their assessment. It's the first time the unit has run and I had only 2 students who came to me for help, out of 40, because they know the resources are already there. So that's what peer-to-peer support is.
The second term we did some in-class feedback for students. It's an anonymous feedback that asks specifically questions on: how did you compare the experience from Sept-Dec and Jan-Easter time. I didn't even ask a question on did you find the tool useful but the comments that came from the students in the column where it says ‘what did you find useful in this unit’, a few of them said peer-to-peer support is fantastic because now I don’t have to worry about my exam preparation, it's all there. That gives me a vote of confidence that I should continue to do that but it also increased the ratings they would give if this unit was gone into the ISS. They were scoring it 5 whereas before Christmas it was just less than 2 so that gives me confidence that actually the students enjoyed it but again I need to look at data from a few years to say what impact it actually had on it. But the exams had been marked for this unit and it looks good and it will be interesting to see how they're translated into metrics which the university will be interested in.