Peer Review of DBR Proposal The structure of this peer review was organised so that an outline of the proposal would be provided for initial feedback; this feedback would then inform the more detailed proposal. The second stage involved a summarised version of the full proposal for peer review within my place of employment. A fellow student – Adam – posted a summary of his DBR proposal on his Blog, prompting me to follow his lead. I thought this was the perfect catalyst for seeking peer review, as feedback could be gained before the work of real research began. I summarised my own ideas, using the same framework as Adam, and I was very satisfied with the response. Davis and Brigitte both gave me some thoughtful and generous feedback. David’s feedback identified a number of areas that required development. First of all, David pointed out that I hadn’t paid due attention to one of the major requirements of the assignment – to incorporate the appropriate design principles in the proposal, and to refer to the DBR template to clarify the problem more precisely. Secondly, the potential lack of resources was acknowledged, but some possible research direction was provided. Thirdly, the need to determine the flavour of NGL that would contribute and underpin the proposal was emphasised as another element missing from my outline. Lastly, there was a caution against using the term “digital native”, as it was a concept that overgeneralises a cohort. I agreed with this last point in particular because the connotations of this term were not particularly relevant to my workplace context. Brigitte reinforced this feedback by suggesting that my proposal appeared to focus more on the solution, rather than the problem or purpose. Brigitte’s feedback also provided some personal context, with descriptions of similar situations in her workplace. This I found very valuable as Brigitte also works in Higher Education, and is an instructional designer. She mentioned that her workplace was using Bots, Q & A systems, Chat services and FAQs. Adam – another NGL student- piped in with another relevant example from the workplace, which involved staff documented solutions in a private wiki; Adam suggested that this concept could be applied to students. The feedback from David, Brigitte and Adam was invaluable for me in the early stages as it provided the focus that I needed to begin researching valid sources and helped to really define the problem I was tackling, so that the implementation would be linked more appropriately. I really feel that without this guidance, I would have struggled to find direction with the literature review. The comments also gave me some very practical examples of how other institutions were confronting these issues. The second stage of the peer review involved gathering feedback from work colleagues. After I had put together a complete rough draft, I summarised the whole proposal and put in it into a Google Doc. I then invited co-workers by email to comment on it. Unfortunately, I had a disappointing response. I’m not sure whether it was because it was shared to Googledocs. Not many people I work with like using Googledocs. Not sure why. It was only when I attached the proposal to an email and approached two members of staff directly, that I was able to elicit feedback. The feedback was limited, probably because of the time factor. I had left this stage a little late- two weeks before the submission date. One staff member - Karin - agreed with the basic premise of the intervention, which was that scaffolded inquiry-based learning is of great benefit in reducing ALC-type staff requirements, but raised the issue that there also needs to be a paradigm shift in student expectations. As Karin points out: Scaffolding automatically slows their progress whilst they develop the requisite skills, so we need to consider how we advertise these offerings to students in order to make them accepting of the time lag or else we may face ‘bad press’ from disgruntled students (Stokes, 2016). Figure 1: Email feedback Source: (Stokes, 2016) The other staff member that provided feedback – Danielle - commented on the practicalities of implementing this intervention, in that advisers would need to determine the type of resources and training required from an organisational point of view. Danielle picked up on the multiple voices concept of the secondary intervention, suggesting that: " the learner could identify one or two learning outcomes they have achieved as a result of this information and provide feedback on how they have implemented that learning i.e. a tick box of several learning outcomes and then a quick line on how they have used that skill with a simple example for the students” (Clarke, 2016).
I found that the feedback from my peers helped a great deal to pinpoint exactly what the problem was and the direction of the research; and this assisted me in designing the intervention. There were two distinct focuses in the feedback. The feedback from my course provided a deeper, more analytical peer review that I found more rewarding from an intellectual point of view; whereas the feedback from work colleagues came from an organisational point of view, which in some ways reinforced the conservative approach to network learning referred to in the literature.
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