Eli Review Usage Report AY 2020-21

Eli Review Usage Report AY 2020-21

Instructor/Student Use

During this challenging academic year, over thirty new San Francisco State instructors have incorporated Eli Review's peer learning in their courses this year.

Here's a brief snapshot of usage of the app and our services:

• 21 instructors completed the online professional development workshop, "Improve Your Peer Learning Pitch."

• About 30 instructors attended at least one of the 30 Office Half-Hour Sessions offered Fridays at 10 AM Pacific; many of these instructors also participated in related CEETL initiatives.

• Through CEETL, Eli Review instructors created online resources for their colleagues to learn more about designing feedback and revision tasks in the app.

• CJ Koenig, Communication, and Aviva Sinervo, Psychology, shared their insights in our Showcase Across Disciplines.

• Kate Manbachi's Sociology assignment was featured in our blog post about "Building Strong Personal Connections."

• 109 courses used the iLearn integration to assign

  • 662 writing tasks

  • 619 peer review tasks

  • 288 revision plans

San Francisco State University paid for 3,000 Eli Review subscriptions. Each student's subscription allows for unlimited use during the academic year. Usage across courses gives students more opportunities for high-impact feedback:

• 1 student used their Eli Review subscription to enroll in 4 courses;

• 53 students in 3 courses;

• 514 students in 2 courses; and

• 2,437 students in 1 course.

So far this year, San Francisco State students used 3,005 Eli Review subscriptions.

Eli Review does not charge institutions for exceeding their subscriptions, so don't worry about summer term courses. Students will still be able to access any summer courses that are connected through iLearn without being prompted to pay.

Eli Review’s standard institutional subscription is $18.15 per student. Their current agreement with San Francisco State is $15 per subscription. That discounted price applies from 3,000 (current) to 5,000 subscriptions.

What students say about Peer Learning w/ Eli Review

Eli Review Student Survey Responses (AY 2020-2021)

• Seven instructors from our peer learning teaching & learning community asked their students to complete the survey.

• 301 students responded to the survey.

• 90% of students say that using Eli Review has been very useful or useful in their learning.

In the past, I have found peer feedback in my classes to be . . .

68% report useful feedback in the past

With Eli Review, I have found peer feedback to be . . .

90% report useful feedback w/ Eli Review

Our Survey Results

• When asked to contrast peer feedback in previous classes with the course using Eli Review, we found that twice as many students said that peer feedback was very useful in their Eli Review course.

• In past courses, nearly one-third of students report either neutral or negative attitudes to peer learning. In the Eli Review courses we surveyed, just 10% of students expressed neutral or negative views.

Digging Deeper into the pedagogical benefits of using Eli Review

Eli Review provides the rails on which an instructor can run a feedback-centric course. Users of Eli stress that they view Eli Review as a pedagogy first, a technology second.

Getting & Giving Peer Feedback

Research supports the idea that there is a reciprocal relationship between giving and getting feedback, and that feedback is at the heart of peer learning. We all know that students want to get feedback and we know that effective feedback must be frequent and immediate. Eli Review serves instructors as a tool that accomplishes both goals.

SFSU students report high levels of positive experiences in this most basic of peer learning goals.

87% found receiving feedback useful

Givers Gain

Our peer learning teaching and learning community focused on teaching students to see giving feedback as an important goal. Faculty in our TLC taught feedback as a reading skill and embraced Eli Review’s research-backed claim that if students can detect (a problem) in the work of others, then they can correct a similar miscue in their own work.

• Our work teaching Givers Gain has been quite successful. Students enter our classes looking only to receive feedback. At the end of a semester with Eli Review, 89% of students say that giving feedback to classmates has been a useful experience.

Getting Ideas

As a collaborative tool, Eli Review builds multiple opportunities for students to read, comment upon and learn from the work of their classmates.

89% say they have gotten good ideas

Nearly 90% of students report that reading the work of classmates have given them good ideas that they applied to their own revisions.

Revision

Teachers often lament student’s tendency to hand in a first draft, or a barely revised second draft in which they’ve tweaked a few grammar miscues. With peer learning pedagogy and Eli Review, faculty have been able to teach students the art of substantial revision processes.

83% say their revision processes improve

• Teaching revision is the hardest hill to climb. Eli Review helps teachers teach revision via revision plan assignments, which create a space for students select and prioritize the feedback comments they’ve received from classmates. They write a revision plan that their instructor also comments upon. Our goal is for students to develop a metacognitive habit. Teachers in our TLC felt that this was the magical moment when real learning happened.

79% have learned better revision skills

• We teach the metacognitive move of revision plans with the hope that our student’s revision skills improve, that indeed they become able to detect and correct their own compositions following feedback.

The Institutional License

We close our brief report by expressing thanks to those in the Division of Undergraduate Education and the Center for Excellence and Equity in Teaching and Learning (CEETL) for supporting our students with an educational license and supporting our faculty as we work together in our Peer Learning with Eli Review Teaching and Learning Community.