This paper was presented at the 2008 Engineering Conference - Innovation Good Practice and Research in Engineering Education.
In October 2007 WebPA was released as Open Source Software by the twoyear collaborative JISC funded WebPA Project which is led by the Faculty of Engineering at Loughborough University. A paper version of the peer assessment tool was developed to assess group work at Loughborough in 1998 with WebPA being the latest iteration. WebPA is an online tool which facilitates both self and peer assessment that aims to provide a quick easy and fair way of assessing individual students working in teams. To this end the software aims to provide an effective method of differentiating individual contributions to group work to improve the overall student learning experience through encouraging self and peer reflection and improve understanding of the assessment process.
Participants will be asked to carry out two group tasks. Firstly each group will create a poster on a selected topic. Secondly each member will assess their own performance and that of each group member in respect of carrying out the first task. The individually assessed scores will then be input into the WebPA software to demonstrate the methodology which will generate individual scores for each group member. Participants will be guided through software features and benefits including individual preferences that can be selected by the tutor.
The experiences benefits and challenges of using WebPA from both an academic and student perspective will be explored. Participants will be invited to share their ideas at various stages and to identify how WebPA might be used within their own teaching. The associated benefits of using the software will become transparent. Participants will be invited to share their ideas at key stages throughout the workshop.
