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> It's a tradeoff. I came into Coursera thinking that I'd like more flexibility. But I now see the benefits of a more structured approach so long as deadlines a

by ics 13y ago

> It's a tradeoff. I came into Coursera thinking that I'd like more flexibility. But I now see the benefits of a more structured approach so long as deadlines aren't too rigid. After all, if you want something totally unstructured, there is lots of video and other material on most topics on the Internet. This is key. I still find myself wishing the deadlines were different here and there (or that they were better distributed... taking 10 courses with everything due in a six hour window Sunday night is annoying and takes being at least a week ahead to avoid). Still, I know that I do better because of it. The peer assessments aren't effective in every course but for some they're absolutely vital. What I'm really looking forward to is seeing how some courses settle, probably after receiving a little more institutional support, into better defined roles. Instead of just splitting up the sequence in terms of "Part I" and "Part II" they could offer exclusively peer reviewed components for people who wish to write papers and a quiz/homework component which then give different certificates (it would be encouraged to earn both). At the moment EdX seems to be the strongest supporter of human review (either peers or TAs) with Harvard courses such as Copyright Law and National Security, but they can do it because the classes are limited to a few hundred people and everyone else must audit.

ghaff 13y ago
Peer review can be pretty good for a number of things when the students doing the reviewing are reasonably competent in the material. They get more problematic as the diversity of the class increases. In my experience, they're also pretty reasonable at grading according to a well-defined and explained rubric (though in a large enough population there will be frustrating outliers). They're much less good at providing useful feedback--a point that seems to be ignored far to often in discussions about peer review. I'm actually taking a Harvard edX course at the moment that takes an interesting approach. For part of the content (labs) what they do instead of peer grading is a self-assessment with detailed evaluation criteria. This works quite well in this instance. If you don't concern yourself with certification it makes a lot of sense to focus on what provides the best feedback.
- ics 13y ago
  Have you taken the Dan Grossman's Programming Languages on Coursera? It gives a very detailed rubric– you're required to complete 3 peer reviews and a self evaluation with the same rubric. That being said the peer review is only worth 10% of your homework grade, the rest is done by the autograder. I haven't gotten a ton of feedback so far– just reviewing other people's solutions is probably more helpful. Still, it's better than some of the other courses. It would be great if there was an incentive for providing meaningful feedback– I don't know if rating your feedback would be taking that too far but it might be more effective than a simple wordcount. My experience on EdX is limited to MIT and Delft– I'm looking forward to a time when I can try out one of the Harvard classes.
  - ghaff 13y ago
    I haven't taken that particular course. I suspect that peer grading could be made better through incentives but, at some point, you're limited by what your peers are capable of in terms of providing feedback. That said, even making the peer review process more explicitly about feedback than grades would be a be a nice framing in the right direction. I'm taking a HarvardX course on Science and Cooking at the moment which is very well done. Not exactly programming though :-)
larve 13y ago
I found that the fact of reviewing others is what actually was the most interesting. Not even getting to see good stuff I wouldn't have come up with myself, but also trying to figure out why people have issues understanding the subject at hand. For more direct and "valuable" feedback, the forums are great. In every course I took there were fantastic discussions on the forums.

by ics 13y ago

ghaff 13y ago

Peer review can be pretty good for a number of things when the students doing the reviewing are reasonably competent in the material. They get more problematic as the diversity of the class increases. In my experience, they're also pretty reasonable at grading according to a well-defined and explained rubric (though in a large enough population there will be frustrating outliers). They're much less good at providing useful feedback--a point that seems to be ignored far to often in discussions about peer review. I'm actually taking a Harvard edX course at the moment that takes an interesting approach. For part of the content (labs) what they do instead of peer grading is a self-assessment with detailed evaluation criteria. This works quite well in this instance. If you don't concern yourself with certification it makes a lot of sense to focus on what provides the best feedback.

ics 13y ago
Have you taken the Dan Grossman's Programming Languages on Coursera? It gives a very detailed rubric– you're required to complete 3 peer reviews and a self evaluation with the same rubric. That being said the peer review is only worth 10% of your homework grade, the rest is done by the autograder. I haven't gotten a ton of feedback so far– just reviewing other people's solutions is probably more helpful. Still, it's better than some of the other courses. It would be great if there was an incentive for providing meaningful feedback– I don't know if rating your feedback would be taking that too far but it might be more effective than a simple wordcount. My experience on EdX is limited to MIT and Delft– I'm looking forward to a time when I can try out one of the Harvard classes.
- ghaff 13y ago
  I haven't taken that particular course. I suspect that peer grading could be made better through incentives but, at some point, you're limited by what your peers are capable of in terms of providing feedback. That said, even making the peer review process more explicitly about feedback than grades would be a be a nice framing in the right direction. I'm taking a HarvardX course on Science and Cooking at the moment which is very well done. Not exactly programming though :-)

larve 13y ago

I found that the fact of reviewing others is what actually was the most interesting. Not even getting to see good stuff I wouldn't have come up with myself, but also trying to figure out why people have issues understanding the subject at hand. For more direct and "valuable" feedback, the forums are great. In every course I took there were fantastic discussions on the forums.