Biographical notes:Dr Helen Purchase started her interest in e-learning with a PhD in Intelligent Tutoring Systems, and has several publications relating to the use of technology in education. As well as co-creator of Aropä, she leads the GUSTTO projecta social medai system for practising academics to share 'Teaching Tips' with their colleagues.Dr John Hamer received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Auckland in 1990, where he served as Senior Lecturer until 2010. He initially created Aropä to support his own teaching. He currently works as a commercial software developer, and has an honorary affiliation with the University of Glasgow.
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Perspectives on Peer-Review: Eight Years of AropäDrawing on eight years of observation and correspondence from the Aropä project, we report on the issues important to academics who conduct on-line student peer-review activities, and the features they request to support their own instructional designs. The Aropä project is unusually broad, having so far supported over one hundred instructors at twenty institutions across nine countries, almost a thousand activities, and more than 36 thousand individual students. As the designers, developers, maintainers and advisors of an evolving and widely used tool, we use our unique position to report on the perspectives and priorities of instructors and students in this important and developing field.reviews on their peers' work. Large classes are easily supported; for example, in August 2015, 948 students each submitted a report for a Commercial Law course at The University of Auckland, and together wrote a total of 2,716 reviews of their peers' work within the period of a week.The authors of this paper are the sole designers, developers and maintainers of the Aropä system. We have complete control, can observe all activity, and are in direct communication with the instructors who use it. We are therefore in a unique position to report on the range and scope of the peer-review activities, including trends, emerging issues and individualisation.During the past eight years, we have had hundreds of conversations about peerreview with over 70 instructors in at least 26 different subject areas. These conversations reveal the wide range of issues that instructors and their students consider important for successful peer-review: some of them relate to the peer-review activity itself, some focus on the requirements for an online peer-review system. In many cases, instructors have requested enhancements to the system so as to support their own assessment design. In this paper, we report on the issues arising from our interactions with instructors, classifying them with respect to operations, pedagogy and administration. Based on this data and our own observations, we conclude by discussing the dominant perspectives of both instructors and students when conducting successful peer-review activities.