The context for this review

This formative review of an online component of a second year clinical subject that is principally delivered face to face was done with a more senior colleague. The review took place as part of a series of reciprocal reviews within a team teaching environment, which mirrors the professions own collaborative team-based approach. In this environment frequent informal peer reviews were already being done as a matter of course and the group had also taken part in a university peer review project. Teaching is not done in a standard semester format with a long teaching year (4 Jan – 19 Dec). For this review regular communication took place face to face with documents being sent by email.

“So we do elements of units amongst ourselves to there is no sort of ownership entirely or no sense of that specifically...I wouldn’t say that it's by any means a requirement [informal peer review], it's just a natural activity of being in the team…we’re actually mostly practicing professionals who job share. So we actually do fractional…. So we still have that very much medical environment team approach which just translates directly into the academic environment anyway. So personality types I think you would actually say that we are all quite team oriented… so it's fairly natural sort of thing to do.”

Review participants

The teacher in this case is Health Sciences academic who works concurrently in clinical practice and had been involved with peer review with her teaching team many times before. This reviewee emphasised the strong team ethic amongst academics in this area, which translates well from the team approach used in the clinical setting.

The reviewer is an experienced Health Sciences academic, from the same teaching team and area who is also teaching similar subjects.

Reason for the review was that this teacher wanted a review of the resources available to students to consolidate and check on their learning of techniques, procedures and images. This was a way of formalising and documenting the common practice of reviewing in her teaching team.

What happened in this review

Aspect of the subject that was focused on for this review was the formative online review quizzes developed for students to help them consolidate their learning.

Forms of evidence reviewed were course documents, assessments and online quiz activities.

Review Process

Pre-review briefing was done face to face using project documentation and was quite straightforward:

“… because we are both very familiar with the content areas that we were reviewing. So there was probably not a need to clarify things as much. We are effectively coming from exactly the same area… with our team environment pretty much we do peer review almost without really thinking about it. Effectively this process was actually a documentation of lots of things… I think it's because we are a close team and we team teach.”

The Review involved the reviewer looking at the optional online review quizzes the teacher had created to help students review topics in this face to face subject. The reviewing pair printed out the online quizzes to review them.

A debrief meeting was done informally and intermittently, just popping by and chatting together, “it was a good process to go through to actually document what we were doing…I certainly have had good feedback since from the students with regard to the resources that I changed. So I was happy with that. That was good.”

Time taken to complete all parts of this review was probably about half a day but this was hard for the participants to estimate because of the length of time between the initial conversations and the debriefing meeting. Although in this review time was not an issue in terms of carrying out the review, the elapsed time of the review that had to be fitted between other commitments required planning and timing of the review to make it useful for subject delivery was tricky, “you have to allow the time for it…you've got to make time for it to have been reviewed...“the issue really is the other competing priorities to actually get to that…Like I would do my bit and then she's been busy with lots of other activities, so it wasn’t something that - the actual physical time didn't take very long…But the actual opportunity to get to that is something that you have to allow a certain time for in any sort of academic process”.

Outcomes of the review

  1. This targeted review confirmed for the teacher the value of the online activity she had developed and she planned as a consequence to develop more of these resources to cover all the topics. She also now feels comfortable about encouraging students to utilise them.
  2. This teacher valued a reviewer who she felt had expertise in the subject content.
  3. She would feel comfortable using peer review as evidence because she is very comfortable with reviews in her team, although she has no immediate plans to do this.
  4. The review was also part of a joint presentation to their professional association by this review pair.

Points to note from this guided review

  • A comfortable review pair who were very used to reviewing colleagues informally, and had also previously participated in a project from their university in this area.
  • This teacher would feel comfortable using peer review as evidence because she is very comfortable with reviews in her team but can see the potential for conflict in some situations because of where people might ‘sit’ on an issue”.
  • Familiarity with the peer review template and process made it easier. Once the process had been completed once it was much easier for the reciprocal review (even for those used to doing reviews informally).