An Online Group Formation, Meeting Scheduling, and Peer Review Platform for Project-based Courses

Abstract

Many CityU Gateway Education (GE) courses are project-based courses that mainly evaluate the student performance based on a group project. From my five-year experience in teaching GE2315 - Security and Privacy in the Information Age, students encounter various difficulties in conducting group projects in a large class. (1) Since year-one students can enroll my course (especially, in Semester A), they do not know anyone in the class; hence, it is very difficult for them to form groups. (2) As all major students (or even associate degree students) can enroll my course, they could have very different class, consultation and part-time job schedules. It is a time-consuming process for them to find out common spare time slots for group meetings every week. (3) The assessment of a group project usually consists of instructor assessment and peer review; however, there is no systematic online platform for students to review their group members. To this end, in this project, I plan to implement a holistic web-based application platform that helps students to form groups, schedule group meetings, and conduct peer reviews. The implemented application can be used for different project-based GE courses in the same semester, and a student's profile can also be shared among courses.