Peer evaluation is a component that can improve the scalability of the OERu course delivery model. There have been discussions on the mailing list about how this might work, but nobody has built the tools so that we can test the ideas in one of the course offerings.

The OER Foundation has been selected as a mentoring organization for this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC). Our call for student developers produced a number of proposals that each could have advanced the OERu and WikiEducator projects but we could only accept one. Akash Agarwal is an enthusiastic third year student at IIIT Hyderabad who will be devoting his summer to developing software to help us explore Peer Evaluation. His complete proposal is available in the wiki.

"I am very grateful to WikiEducator for showing faith in me and giving me such a warm welcome" said Akash Agarwal.  "It would be really helpful if I could get some critical feedback about how peer evaluation could be implemented in the courses delivered by the OERu. Later on, I am keen to take on some of the larger technical challenges and possibilities of making OERu courses truly scalable, open and automated." 

Timothy McCallum (USQ) and Luis Miguel Morillas (WikiEducator community) have agreed to help with the technical reviews of Akash's work.

There are many practical and implementation elements to consider, particularly in our environment where courses not only may be studied for credit, but might offer alternative certification for different forms of participation, have students dip in and out, or even be offered in parallel to a more traditional course at a partner institution. During our initial prototypes we will focus on trialling peer evaluation as a mechanism for peer-learning support to gain experience in how these methods could be used for formative evaluation and potentially reliable methods for recognizing participation in OERu courses.    

The GSoC development schedule only allows 3 months of coding starting May 19th. This compressed timeline means that feedback from the community as early as possible is essential in making Akash's ambitious project the best it can be.