Quality of peer feedback in relation to instructional design: A comparative study in energy and sustainability MOOCs

Peer feedback has become a common practice in MOOCs for its capacity to scale formative assessment and feedback on higher-order abilities. Though many practices for improving peer assessment have been examined, there is a lack of knowledge of how instructional design and platform features affect the quality of peer assessment and the relative frequency of different types of peer feedback comments. This study aimed to improve understanding of the relationship between quality of feedback and peer-feedback’ pedagogical design. Peer feedback instructional design and peer feedback comment data were examined from two MOOCS in a similar domain of personal relevance but with substantially different designs. Country of origin of the feedback provider was also examined to control for cultural/linguistic effects. Differences between the two courses were observed in both the pedagogical designs and in the focus of peer comments, suggesting that peer feedback design is an important guide for the focus of peer feedback comments. Furthermore, the results support the idea that instructional design features, mainly the guide’ structure and focus, determine the type of comments that participants will produce and hence receive.