Partnership Reviewing: A Cooperative Approach for Peer Review of Complex Educational Resources

Weatherley, John and Sumner, Tamara and Khoo, Michael and Hoffmann, Marcel (2002) Partnership Reviewing: A Cooperative Approach for Peer Review of Complex Educational Resources. In Proceedings Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, Portland, OR.

Abstract

Review of digital educational resources, such as course modules, simulations, and data analysis tools, can differ from review of scholarly articles, in the heterogeneity and complexity of the resources themselves. The Partnership Review Model, as demonstrated in two cases, appears to promote cooperative interactions between distributed resource reviewers, enabling reviewers to effectively divide up the task of reviewing complex resources with little explicit coordination. The shared structural outline of the resource made visible in the review environment enables participants to monitor other reviewers’ actions and to thus target their efforts accordingly. This reviewing approach may be effective in educational digital libraries that depend on community volunteers for most of their reviewing.