Rethinking Authentic Assessments - A Peer-Assessed Virtual Conference for Online Collaborative Learning

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the teaching challenges of engaging students, building a learning community, and creating enriching learning experiences. Here, we present an authentic, asynchronous assessment method applied as a peer-assessed virtual conference task. The peer assessment and facilitation effectively generated a strong sense of community and teamwork (95% agreement) and enabled the students to generate a deeper understanding of the course content (73% agreement) by fostering critical self-reflection (87% agreement). Student engagement excelled whereby many choose to engage in additional presentations outside of their allocated peer markings. Consistently positive feedback highlighted the task's utility as an online learning tool and its efficacy in shaping a collaborative class community besides remote teaching condition. Additionally, the multi-faceted nature of the assessment promoted a broad range of effective teaching qualities, including collaboration, communication, and application of theory in innovative contexts which lends itself to higher education. Overall, the virtual conference tool and its peer-based facilitation can be considered for effective engineering education practice, which may also apply to other scientific disciplines to improve student learning and experiences.