Practice Makes Perfect: Student-Generated Questions for Learning
Content
As more classes move online and students become accustomed to working remotely, it can be challenging for instructors to keep students engaged with course content. One approach which can work well is to have students create learning materials for their peers. There are learning benefits associated with students reflecting on, and explaining, their understanding of relevant concepts as they create resources. In addition, distributing the work required to generate resources enables the rapid creation of large repositories of content. PeerWise is a free, easy to use tool in which students create, share, answer and discuss practice questions (MCQs) that target the material they are learning. Participants will learn how to set up PeerWise for use in their courses, how to efficiently assess students’ contributions and how to make sense of the data it produces.
Learning goals
- The pedagogy behind student-generated practice questions (test-enhanced learning and the benefits of generating content)
- Using PeerWise as an enabling technology
- Designing assessments for student-generated question activities
Target audience
Teachers of any discipline
Date
March 29, 2021 09:00 AM - 12:30 AM (online)
This workshop is held in English.
Facilitator
Dr. Paul Denny is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His research interests include developing and evaluating tools for supporting collaborative learning, particularly involving student-generated resources, and exploring the ways that students engage with these environments. One of his projects, PeerWise, hosts more than six million practice questions, with associated solutions and explanations, created by students from 90 countries. He has fostered a community of educational researchers around this project, more than 160 of whom have published their work as a result. Dr Denny has been recognized for contributions to teaching both nationally and internationally, receiving New Zealand’s National Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award (2009), the Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia Award for Outstanding Contributions to Teaching (2010), and the QS Reimagine Education Overall Award (2018).