After COVID, Dr. Kym Brown wanted to ensure that students weren’t missing out on social connection and interaction. Now in week 12, she runs an all-in poster presentation workshop (worth 10%) with 320 students and about 70 groups, that encourages students to talk with each other, have fun and to celebrate at the end of semester.
Using FeedbackFruits, a process that used to take days — collating and distributing students’ peer feedback and marks— is done by the time the workshop is completed.
I run a live poster workshop presentation in week 12 worth 10% of the final mark. It follows on from the group assignment that is a written report, they then take one factor and develop it further and do some analysis which they present as a poster. Students physically put their poster up in the lecture hall, along the side walls, along the front seats, the back walls and even outside the lecture hall. In groups of five, two students present their groups poster while the other three students in the team go around and provide feedback and marks on other groups posters.
We have the loudest room on campus when it runs, with 320 enrolled and about 70 groups of five or so students — it's very noisy with everyone in the room at once!
Students love it! The content and the way that they can deliver it in a novel kind of way and they can be very creative with their posters. I also give a 1% bonus for the team that was voted as having the best poster presentation, I call it the “People's Choice Award”!
I was running the class in the prior year manually, so on my office floor I would have to sort all the teams. I'd have all the feedback sheets and I would record the marks, then I would have to put them in the relevant piles, and then I would go down to the photocopy machine and scan each one, package them for each group and each team.Then I would have to individually email each group, which took quite a few days, a lot of people and a lot of time and effort. So discovering FeedbackFruits, a tool that facilitates student peer feedback, has been a bit of a godsend!
I began attending the regular FeedbackFruits drop-in zoom sessions hosted by MET(Monash Education Technologies) and FeedbackFruits, which was really helpful. You can be a complete beginner and ask all the dumb questions.
Catherine demonstrated a FeedbackFruits template suitable for peer review of live poster presentation in a workshop and walked me through the setup of the FeedbackFruits activity.
I attended a few times and they helped a bit each time and then by the time I got to week 12, I had my activity set up and ready to go.
I set it up so student groups review nine other groups. So the three students not presenting their group poster then had to go and find nine other teams. If they were smart, they would divide and conquer, so each student reviewed three other groups. Students would log in to the FeedbackFruits activity in Moodle and provide the feedback for those other groups inside the activity during the workshop.
One student presenting their group's poster, with students from other groups gathered around using FeedbackFruits on their laptops to provide feedback in real-time during the workshop.
After the poster session, I came back to my office and there were no feedback sheets to sort or marks to assign; it was all done! The marks were there, the comments were there. I could easily see which team was the top team and I contacted them immediately saying, “Congratulations, you got the bonus 1%!” They were really thrilled. So it was a terrific way to end the semester!
The workshop is only 10%, but every student who talks to me says, wow, I've never done this before. It’s great because they're actually there in person interacting with their peers and their peers are marking them.
This semester, I'm also going to set up a second FeedbackFruits activity where they can give marks to the people on their team.
I think intrinsically, students feel it's a fairer system when they can mark their peers. If there's someone who's a slacker and doesn't pull their weight in the group and the others are saying, well we've done all the work, then it should feed through. It may be only 2 or 3 marks out of the ten, but still it will make a difference.
So I’ll have two Feedback Fruits activities, one for marking the other teams and one to mark their own team members' contribution to the group.
This exemplar is easy to implement.
Recommended resources and training:
Think about what group activities you are already running or would like to run but are time and effort intensive to organise. Using FeedbackFruits could be an excellent idea. There are many options when setting up Feedback Fruits so I found it immensely useful to attend the FeedbackFruits drop-in zoom sessions which are held regularly online. They allow you to ask questions about the tool and how to best use it for your context. Also making contact with Education technologies (educationtechnologies@monash.edu) was very useful.
Here are some additional resources that you can browse to help you implement this assessment.
