Teaching a foreign language within the framework of an online course has its specifics. Control in such courses is characterised by a lack of feedback from the teacher (only self-learning of course materials is assumed), a decrease in the individualization of learning, an increase in the role of students' independent work, which leads to the use of a method of mutual checking and the associated need to develop students' cognitive abilities for self-assessment of the results of mastering an online course. The development of such abilities is particularly relevant in the online course “Russian as a foreign language”, where students need to evaluate texts in a foreign language. The aim of the research is to introduce conceptually a step-by-step training model for introducing peer review tasks within an online course in Russian as a foreign language and evaluate its effectiveness. The peer checking assignments in the block “We write in Russian” from the massive online course “Russian as a foreign language. B1+” on the “Otkrytoye Obrazovaniye” (Open Education) platform were used as the data for the study. The general scientific method of analysis and synthesis, targeted observation and the modeling method were applied. An overview of the main research papers on the forms of control in massive online courses is given. Attention is drawn to such features of control in a distance learning course as the lack of feedback from the teacher, a decrease in the individualization of learning, an increase in the role of students' independent work, and the related need to develop students' cognitive abilities to evaluate a text according to the developed criteria. The stages of formation of the cognitive procedures of different levels are considered - from the level of rules to the cognitive level associated with the students' awareness of their cognitive strategies, their effectiveness, as well as the ability to independently assess their language and speech level. As the result of the study, the authors present a training model of tasks aimed at forming students’ competence of an “expert” who can check the peer checking tasks. It is concluded that students can adequately evaluate each other's academic work, using the proposed evaluation parameters, taking into account the type of the text, its genre, and the typical language means of its implementation. The submitted step-by-step training model of tasks for peer review can be successfully used in teaching other foreign languages at different levels.
