Text revision practices in an e-learning environment: fostering the learning by design perspective

Abstract

Text review activities in formal schooling settings are by and large carried out vertically and often in an authoritarian way, in which teachers usually assign text production activities for students whose only readers and reviewers are their own teachers. Consequently, students rarely have the experience of sharing their texts with one another. Conversely, in the Scholar e-learning environment, students have different experiences of both assessing their peers’ texts and commenting on the peers’ reviews (feedback on feedback). In order to understand how Scholar enables horizontally text reviewing practices, this article aims at developing a qualitative analysis of the peer reviewing process carried out in the Scholar e-learning environment for one online graduate course. To do so, this article is based upon the Learning by design approach, which is sustained by the theoretical concepts of Multiliteracies, New Literacies, Space of flows Design, Agency, and Knowledge Processes.