PI: Prof. Michael Bernstein, PhD

Abstract

Hundreds of students now populate in-person design courses, and thousands are enrolling in massive online design courses on Coursera. Can these crowds enable a more effective design education? Expert feedback from other designers comprises one important aspect of design education. Timing is important: when students receive feedback within a day, they apply the concepts they learn more successfully. However, in today’s interaction design education, expert feedback is only available when assignments are due and is delayed by several days or weeks.

Rather than treating the scale of online courses as a limitation, we are taking advantage of the numbers to offer rapid, early design feedback to interaction  design students. PeerStudio is an online community attached to massive open online courses (MOOCs) in disciplines with open-ended assignments such as HCI design. Its goal is to offer high-quality formative feedback within an hour of student submission. PeerStudio encourages students to submit early and often, receive rapid feedback and then iterate. To provide rapid feedback, the system guides students to give feedback other peers’ recent drafts; doing so unlocks feedback on their own draft. We aim to show that peer feedback can not only provide accurate summative feedback, but also guide early concepts to higher-quality results quickly.