For Marty Whalen, professor in Business and Communications at Woods College, joining CDIL’s faculty working group, “Unlocking the Power of Peer Learning,” was a no-brainer. With the goal of building community and collaboration in her asynchronous courses, Marty set out to learn the best tools for integrating peer feedback. 

Integrating Feedback Fruits

When preparing for her half-term asynchronous course, Marty decided she wanted to incorporate more peer collaboration into her course. Often, this can be challenging, as students tend to value the independence and flexibility of this modality. However, Marty wanted to show the benefit of working closely with others in an online setting. To accomplish this, she joined “Unlocking the Power of Peer Learning” with the goal of integrating the peer learning tool “Feedback Fruits” into her course.

Over the course of four sessions, Marty worked with nine other faculty members and Learning Designer Doreen Richards to map out strategies for integrating Feedback Fruits. By the end of the session, however, Marty not only accomplished her goal of learning the new collaborative learning tool, but she also experienced the value of collaborating with peers firsthand.

Experience Learning from Others

For Marty, the biggest benefit of the working group was the collaboration between fellow faculty members and CDIL’s learning designers. While she initially set out to learn Feedback Fruits, she ended up gaining so much more. 

“It’s always very beneficial to have an opportunity to speak with other faculty. Particularly now, with the proliferation of online tools, it’s great to get experience learning from others,” Marty explains. She also says how useful it was to work with faculty from multiple disciplines and to learn how they might incorporate peer feedback in different ways.

From faculty and learning designers, she learned about several additional feedback tools, including Perusall. Being able to compare those tools to Feedback Fruits helped strengthen her understanding of the tool and solidified her decision to incorporate it into her course. 

According to Marty, Learning Designer Doreen Richards was an immense help in integrating Feedback Fruits. Through one-on-one meetings throughout the summer, Doreen helped map out strategies for integration, bounced ideas back and forth, and offered her own feedback. By the end of the summer, Marty felt confident integrating this tool into her course.

For other faculty members interested in integrating peer feedback tools, Marty offers a piece of advice: “Allow time to integrate the tool. As one of the CDIL professionals said to me once, ‘we don’t want the tool to become the stumbling block.’”

The collaborative nature of CDIL’s working group allowed Marty to develop strategies and a practical timeline for integrating the tool, from introducing the tool early on to incorporating practice assignments into the course. 

Above all, that is Marty’s biggest takeaway from the working group: the power of collaboration, not only for students using feedback tools, but for the faculty working together to integrate them.

Building Community through Collaboration

When asked what Marty hopes the impact of peer feedback will be on her students, she emphasizes the importance of community.

She hopes that this “opportunity will show students that, even if you’re in an asynchronous course, there is benefit to building community in the course you’re in at present and down the road as you build connections within Woods College.”

Marty is grateful to live out this practice of community within the CDIL Working Group. Integrating peer feedback into an asynchronous course is no easy task, but with the right support and collaboration, students will quickly learn the power of community in online learning.