Teaching Beyond the Curriculum

Abstract

The pandemic forced academics to explore new ways of fostering connection, communication and collaboration between students. Architecture students tend to spend a lot of time together in studio spaces, informally reviewing and commenting on their peers’ work. This peer-to-peer feedback is one of the valuable contributors to their education but the pandemic severely restricted the opportunities for it. This paper will discuss the outcomes of a pilot project involving peer review via a new online tool with a cohort of first-year architecture students enrolled in a module ‘Into Practice’ at University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland, during the pandemic in an effort to tackle this challenge. The tool used – peerScholar (https://www.peerscholar.com), was developed by Professor Joordens and Professor Paré from the University of Toronto and was introduced at UCD in September 2020 as an Educational Technology Software Evaluation Pilot. The module in question was one of the modules selected to participate in the pilot project. The paper will report on the process of implementing online peer review via peerScholar in the module, which at that time was undergoing changes with a goal of making it more inclusive, and discuss both the benefits of using peer review for the teaching and learning process in the early stages of architectural education, including fostering collaborative learning and critical thinking, as well as issues to consider with this approach.