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Learning about Deadlines from a Community of Learners

Published: 03 June 2019 Publication History

Abstract

As we are regularly teaching university courses of 600-800 students, we are constantly looking for ways to create a meaningful educational experience for our students to counter the lack of individual mentoring. Therefore, we have been developing a learning platform customised to suit the needs of our students. Peer reviewing is a central component in this system where students hand in challenges and review the work of their peers to provide them with individual feedback. This paper reports on four designs regarding deadlines in this submission system. Our initial goal was an open submission system to allow for self-organisation; for the students to take responsibility of their own learning journey; and to foster a more self-directed and motivated learning culture. We discuss expected and unexpected repercussions caused by our design decisions from the perspectives of both the community of learners and the lecture staff. We evaluated different deadline designs, only to find that when we approached our 'ideal' design, the distribution of work throughout the semester had a highly negative impact on workload and stress levels for lecture staff as well as students. This insight led to a more traditional deadline design that still makes room for self-directed learning and promotes better input from the community of learners in the same deadline cycles.

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  • (2024)From One-Size-Fits-All to Individualisation: Redefining MOOCs through Flexible Learning PathsProceedings of the Eleventh ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale10.1145/3657604.3662037(154-164)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2024

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    C&T '19: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Communities & Technologies - Transforming Communities
    June 2019
    375 pages
    ISBN:9781450371629
    DOI:10.1145/3328320
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

    In-Cooperation

    • OCG: Oesterreichische Computer Gesellschaft
    • TU Wien: TU Wien
    • EUSSET: European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 03 June 2019

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    Author Tags

    1. community of learners
    2. deadlines
    3. design-based research
    4. education
    5. peer feedback
    6. peer review
    7. self-directed learning

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    C&T '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 29 of 59 submissions, 49%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 80 of 183 submissions, 44%

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    • (2024)From One-Size-Fits-All to Individualisation: Redefining MOOCs through Flexible Learning PathsProceedings of the Eleventh ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale10.1145/3657604.3662037(154-164)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2024

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