Is scalable 'students as partners’ possible?

Towards large-scale, inclusive, in-class partnerships

Abstract

Amid the growing practice of engaging with students as partners in learning and teaching, there have been well-known critiques of the practice’s often small-scale, extra-curricular, project-based, and often exclusive, models of student participation. In this research, we respond to these concerns through the evaluation of a whole-of-class approach to student partnership which harnessed a scalable, online peer-recommender platform known as RiPPLE (Recommendation in Personalised Peer Learning Environments). Through the platform, educators partner with students to develop a large repository of learning resources where students can contribute by authoring learning resources and/or reviewing and providing feedback on their peer's submissions. In this study, we present the evaluation of this intervention, including the development of a transferable survey instrument based on key outcomes related to student partnership. Survey results (N= 889) indicated that many, though not all, of the previously evidenced benefits of partnership occurred, for example, students’ self-reported gains in learning engagement and self-efficacy about their ability to contribute learning resources. These findings suggest that large-scale, in-class partnerships have promising potential to expand the benefits of partnership at scale and open up new insights on how to leverage technology to support large-scale, inclusive learning and teaching innovations.