Information for instructors

Welcome

Welcome to PeerWise. This guide, intended for instructors considering using PeerWise, gives a quick description of the tool and outlines some of the potential benefits to both students and staff. It includes a few suggestions for using PeerWise in your course and for motivating students.

What is PeerWise?

PeerWise is an online repository of multiple-choice questions that are created, answered, rated and discussed by students.

Typically, at the beginning of a term, a course using PeerWise begins with an empty repository. This grows gradually as the course progresses and students author and contribute relevant questions. All activity remains anonymous to students, however instructors are able to view the identity of question and comment authors and have the ability to delete inappropriate questions. In practice, instructor moderation is rarely necessary and PeerWise is often used with little staff involvement.

PeerWise has been used in courses covering a variety of disciplines. Anthropology, Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Maths, Medicine, Physics, Population Health, Psychology, and more. Any course for which it makes sense for students to author their own multiple-choice questions and to explain their understanding of a topic in their own words could benefit from using PeerWise.

Benefits to students

PeerWise provides a number of learning opportunities to students:

Benefits to instructors

PeerWise also provides a number of benefit to instructors:

Suggestions for use

Below are a few recommendations for incorporating PeerWise into your course. These are intended as suggestions only - other approaches may also work well:

Join us!

PeerWise is freely available - if you would like to use PeerWise in a class you are teaching and are ready to get started, please request an instructor account:

Request an instructor account

Contact us

If you have any questions, please contact:

Dr. Paul Denny
Department of Computer Science
The University of Auckland
Phone: +64-9-373 7599 x 87087
Email: paul@cs.auckland.ac.nz
Email: peerwise@cs.auckland.ac.nz

Return to information about PeerWise