Use cases

Another use case for RiPPLE is to facilitate peer-review. Having students peer-review each other’s projects or presentation can provide numerous benifits: 

• It encourages deep learning because
  • students can learn from the successes of others
  • students can learn from other's mistakes
  • it helps improve students’ self-evaluation skills
• It helps students better understand  assessment criteria and the assignment task
• It helps students receive timely feedback
  • Students can respond and engage better with the feedback from peers compared to teachers. 

Implementation tips 

Students can use the Note resources type to develop project reports or link to video presentations. Once the resource is submitted, it will go through peer moderation where other students in the class can provide feedback on the report or the presentation. 

Please note that while RiPPLE can be used for providing peer feedback on students’ projects, reflections and individual work, it is not appropriate for peer marking of an assignment where all of the students were expected to complete the same task.  

Research demonstrates one of the most effective ways to study is to practice. Despite this, students tend to study by re-reading and re-watching learning content. Providing students with a large bank of study resources makes practicing more attractive because students don’t have to create all the practice material by themselves. 

Providing students with a large bank of study resources: 

• encourages retrieval practice,
• makes it easier for students to practice,
• can makes study more enjoyable,
• can increase satisfaction,
• can improve meta-cognition and self-regulation,
• helps teachers find class-wide misconceptions,
• as students practice with RiPPLE, their knowledge is calculated and used to provide students with recommended resources. For example, if a student is struggling in topic 1, RiPPLE will recommend easy resources to the student. As the student improves RiPPLE will slowly present harder and harder resources until the student has mastered topic 1. 

Providing students with a personalised learning pathway and displaying students their performance can: 

• improve achievement,
• reduce over-confusion,
• reduce redundant practice,
• Helps students better understand their learning, and
• Helps students make better study decisions.

Implementation tips 

To develop a large bank of study resources we recommend attaching assessment to the creation and moderation activities in RiPPLE. Once resources are created in one semester, you can carry over these resources to a future semester. While you might already have a large bank of study resources available from previous semester we still recommend encouraging students to create and evaluated study resources themselves as these activities drive deep learning. 

A large amount of research has shown that quizzing students during live or recorded lectures is far more effective than providing a conventional lecture. Quizzing can: 

• help encode information into memory,
• improve meta-cognition,
• improve engagement,
• improve attendance, 
• reduce mind-wondering,  
• provide feedback to students at scale, 
• help instructors spot class-wide misconceptions, and
• help instructor provide just in-time teaching.

Implementation tips  

• Start lectures by quizzing students on pre-lecture material and previous week's content.
  • This encourages students to complete pre-lecture content (as they know they will be quizzed) and continuously revise the previous week's work.  
• Ask students 5-15 questions throughout the lecture. 
• Have tutors ask students a few questions before the tutorial about the previous week’s lecture.
  • This encourages students to pay attention during the lecture as they know they will be quizzed. 
• When asking difficult questions use a think-pair-share activity to do this: 

1. have students answer the question by themselves, 
2. show students the distribution of responses on RiPPLE and ask them to pair up with their neighbours and discuss their solution,
3. after a couple of minutes. reopen the question for responses and pick out a few people to share their responses to the class, and
4. finally, reveal the answer and discuss why each option is correct or incorrect. 

• Many students watch lecture recordings so make sure to make the activity available out-side-of class and encourage students to follow along on the recording. 
• Encourage students to re-attempt the activity as revision. 
• Explain the benefits of retrieval practice.
• Assign marks for participating in activities.

When students study together this can result in greater achievement and a variety of other positive benefits. Unfortunately, students have reported struggling to find study partners.  That’s why RiPPLE has a “Study groups” feature which helps student find study partners and organize a time to study together.  To do this, students create a profile where they list their availability and then search for peers they want to connect with. If their peer also wants to study together, the students will be connected and can propose a study place and time.   

When students study with peers this can: 

• increased achievement, 
• increased social cohesion, 
• increase satisfaction,  
• increase positive emotion,
• increase effective study technique use,
• reduce anxiety, and
• reduce social isolation.

Implementation tips 

• Encourage students to:
  • use the study groups feature early in the semester,
  • study with others and to use the feature a few weeks before a large exam, and
  • use the study groups feature for group assignments.
• Explain to students the potential benefits of studying with a peer.