2023 Australasian Actuarial Education and Research Symposium

Poon Leung

UNSW

Building a student community to supercharge peer feedback

A sense of belonging and community is a vital part of the student experience. Regrettably, these elements are often seen as supplementary or tangential to the core academic curriculum. In my data visualisation course at UNSW, I have instead integrated belonging and community explicitly into the core of this course. The course creates a collaborative environment for students, and leverages this to scaffold assignments using peer feedback. Students actively share drafts of their work into this collaborative environment and bounce ideas off each other, which also has the convenient side-effect of reducing the burden on the convenor. The benefits of this process are immediately visible. Students are actively engaged both in-person and online. The quality of students' work is clearly improving over the term, and more importantly they are consciously aware of this. The numbers also back this up. A survey conducted at the end of the course had a high response rate, and overwhelmingly positive feedback. In this talk, I will share how I achieved this in my course, my plans moving forward, and some tips I have for anyone considering implementing these ideas in their own courses.