Abstract
While student populations in higher education are becoming more heterogeneous, recently several attempts have been made to introduce online peer support to decrease the tutor load of teachers. We propose a system that facilitates synchronous online reciprocal peer support activities for ad hoc student questions: the Synchronous Allocated Peer Support (SAPS) system. Via this system, students with questions during their learning are allocated to competent fellow-students for answering. The system is designed for reciprocal peer support activities among a group of students who are working on the same fixed modular material every student has to finish, such as courses with separate chapters. As part of a requirement analysis of online reciprocal peer support to succeed, this chapter is focused on the second requirement of peer competence and sustainability of our system. Therefore a study was conducted with a simulation of a SAPS-based allocation mechanism in the NetLogo simulation environment and focuses on the required minimum population size, the effect of the addition of extra allocation parameters or disabling others on the mechanism's effectiveness, and peer tutor load spread in various conditions and its influence on the mechanism's effectiveness. The simulation shows that our allocation mechanism should be able to facilitate online peer support activities among groups of students. The allocation mechanism holds over time and a sufficient number of students are willing and competent to answer fellow-students' questions. Also, fine-tuning the parameters (e.g. extra selection criteria) of the allocation mechanism further enhances its effectiveness.
Highlights
1.1 Society and education have changed rapidly in recent decades
To develop an online reciprocal peer support system that is suitable for smaller population sizes and that provides students with support more quickly, we introduce the SAPS system (Synchronous Allocated Peer Support)
7.1 The purpose of this study was to explore the feasibility of an allocation mechanism for online reciprocal peer support activities among groups of students working on the same modular material
Summary
1.1 Society and (higher) education have changed rapidly in recent decades. The digital revolution has had its influence on the educational process (Sloep & Jochems 2007 ). As a result student populations are less homogeneous, students being increasingly involved in different activities This leads to increasing tutoring needs, which has had a negative effect on teacher workload (Fox & MacKeogh 2003 ; Rumble 2001). Peer tutoring could have a positive effect on the learning process and knowledge construction (Fantuzzo et al 1989 ; Gyanani & Pahuja 1995; King et al 1998 ; Wong et al 2003 ). Fantuzzo et al ( 1989) found higher learning outcomes and more social interaction in a peer tutoring setting, as compared to several control groups such as a group that received video-based instruction, which they argue was caused by the element of structured exchange between students subjected to the peer tutoring. Other studies found that peer tutoring stimulates interactions leading to knowledge construction (Gyanani & Pahuja 1995;Slavin 1995), that students http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/14/1/1.html
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