Made possible by the advanced learning technologies, flipped classroom is gaining increasing momentums in recent years. Peer instruction is an indispensable piece of flipped classroom. Through peer instruction, not only students are enabled to learn from each during the self-learning stage, but also instructor is enabled to focus on explaining the truly difficult concepts in class. In practice, nevertheless, it is challenging to promote peer instruction in large classes, where the participating students are characterized by the diversified backgrounds and different understandings. This paper presents a peer-to-peer learning platform (the P2P platform) to facilitate the peer instruction process in the context of flipped classroom. Based on learning feedbacks provided by individual students, the P2P platform functions to divide a large class into multiple small study groups, within which, students can engage in peer instruction to learn from each other. Meanwhile, the platform will provide instructor with the aggregated, analyzed, and visualized student feedbacks, which can be used to redesign the instruction delivery in the classroom. The key functionalities of the P2P platform are elaborated in this paper. The platform has been piloted based on a technology-enabled international course that was participated by 138 students from 8 global universities. Some lessons learned from interviewing the course participants are presented as well.
Dr. Yun Dai is a postdoc research fellow in the Viterbi School of Engineering, at the University of Southern California, and also the program manager of the Viterbi iPodia Program (ViP). Her research interest broadly involves engineering education, learning technology, and global education.
Dr. Ang Liu is a senior lecturer at the School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, University of New South Wales, Australia
Stephen Lu is the David Packard Chair in Manufacturing Engineering at University of Southern California. His current professional interests include design thinking, collaborative engineering, technological innovation, and education reform. He has over 330
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