From in the Class or in the Wild?

Abstract

As demand for design education increases, instructors are struggling to provide timely, personalized feedback for student projects. Gathering feedback from classroom peers and external crowds offer scalable approaches, but there is little evidence of how they compare. We report on a study in which students (n=127) created early-and late-stage prototypes as part of nine-week projects. At each stage, students received feedback from peers and external crowds: their own social networks, online communities, and a task market. We measured the quality, quantity and valence of the feedback and the actions taken on it, and categorized its content using a taxonomy of critique discourse. The study found that peers produced feedback that was of higher perceived quality, acted upon more, and longer compared to the crowds. However, crowd feedback was found to be a viable supplement to peer feedback and students preferred it for projects targeting specialized audiences. Feedback from all sources spanned only a subset of the critique categories. Instructors may fill this gap by further scaffolding feedback generation. The study contributes insights for how to best utilize different feedback sources in project-based courses.

Making tacit knowledge explicit: the case for online peer feedback in the studio critique

“…The shift from the teacher as the central figure of the critique to a more democratic process where more perspectives were recorded suited the majority but not all students. These findings align with some design educators who support this shift in authority to a more decentralised model (e.g., Fleischmann, 2016;Wauck et al, 2017;Yorgancıoğlu, 2020).…”

“…Design educators have utilized online technology for peer critique in various design domains. For instance, Wauck et al (2017) surveyed 127 UI design students from three North American universities who engaged in small assessment groups and shared project prototypes online, resulting in perceived higher quality feedback emphasizing on process. Similarly, Jones (2014) discusses the use of Compendium DS software to facilitate visual interaction and assessment among students online, leading to significantly valuable dialogue for student learning.…”

Comparing Generic and Community-Situated Crowdsourcing for Data Validation in the Context of Recovery from Substance Use Disorders

“…Systems that utilize members of the same community or known channels as the crowd often leverage their intrinsic interest in a particular domain and their sense of belonging to the community [46,76]. This form of crowdsourcing has proven to receive better quality feedback for class projects from classroom peers [16,80]. Moreover, researchers have discussed the efcacy of crowdsourcing peer-based altruistic support in critical contexts, such as to reduce depression and to promote engagement [64], for generating behavior change plans [1,17], to exchange health information [71], etc.…”

Crowd-powered creativity support systems

“…We will investigate the perceived usefulness and fairness of crowdsourced feedback in the context of an undergraduate design course. The study will add to the body of knowledge of applying crowd feedback systems in education [4,29]. The aim of this study is to contextualize crowdsourced feedback and creativity support within a realistic design context.…”