Enhancing Creativity, Critical Thinking, Communication and Collaboration Skills Through Online Double-Looped Peer Review

Critical thinking, creativity, communication, and collaboration are fundamental to solving complex problems of today's world. Coined "The 4Cs" by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, these competencies are not only demanded by employers, but also are crucial to success in life. The growing consensus is that mastering these skills has to begin in the classroom. Yet, they cannot be taught by the didactic method, through lectures, memorization, and multiple-choice tests. Mastering 4Cs requires practice of solving complex real-world problems through guided social interactions and projects. The student-instructor relation has to transform back to the Socratic method.

How can we build such learning environment while facing today's educational challenges - ever-increasing class sizes, diminishing face-to-face interaction with students in online courses, and changing cognitive and emotional needs of the modern ëwired' youth? This question led us to explore, design, and apply innovative information technology to engage students in social learning. In this workshop, we will discuss the challenges of fostering 4Cs in large and online classes and present Mobius SLIP, an innovative approach to peer learning that provides a new level of engagement in online education.

Mobius SLIP provides greater engagement, promotes 4Cs, compliments and even replaces standardized assessments of students' performance. It is different from other peer assessment software in a number of ways. Mobius SLIP facilitates social learning through double-looped peer evaluation of complex tasks. It provides reliable, detailed learning analytics and visualizations, and through augmented intelligence enables professors to easily provide unique, personalized and targeted feedback to every student even in a large class.

In this 90-minute interactive workshop, participants will engage in a conversation about challenges of massive online education to recognize specific instructor "pains" that may be addressed through technology-enabled social learning. Further, participants will engage in a hands-on interactive demonstration of student and instructor experiences in Mobius SLIP. This cloud-based software can be used on any internet-connected desktop or mobile computer device, and we expect participants to bring their own devices. Upon completion of the demo, participants will be given opportunity to ask questions and to discuss advantages and disadvantages of using Mobius SLIP.

Specifically, this workshop will pursue the following learning objectives:

1. Participants will identify specific "pains" experienced by instructors offering creative and critical thinking activities in the context of massive online education. Participants will create a list of these "pains" and suggested possible remedies (allocated time up to 15 minutes);

2. Participants, acting as students in Mobius SLIP, will create user accounts and complete a brief assignment involving creating an artifact and participating in the double-looped mutual peer review process. Then participants will be presented learning analytics and visualization through which they will interpret and understand the outcomes of peer review (allocated time 40 minutes);

3. Participants will be presented the instructor side of Mobius SLIP and will be able to understand how instructors setup, launch, monitor and assess student performance and provide formative and summative assessment (allocated time 15 minutes);

4. Participant will ask questions and discuss their experiences, identify strengths and weaknesses of the presented approach, and make recommendation for future use (allocated time 20 minutes).

Interested participants will be provided with Mobius SLIP instructor accounts, handouts, references to the website and contact information. This workshop is suitable to participants of all levels. We welcome faculty members as well as technology and pedagogy innovators.