Peer review between students has a 40-year history in academia. During the last half of that period, web-based peer-review systems have been used in tens of thousands of classes. Many online systems have been developed, in diverse settings and with diverse purposes. The systems, however, have common concerns: assigning capable reviewers to each student submission, insuring review quality, and delivering reliable scores, in cases where the systems are used for summative review of student work. Many strategies have been proposed to meet those concerns, and tested in relatively small numbers of courses. The next step is to scale up the studies to learn how well they perform in diverse settings, and with large numbers of students. This project brings together researchers from several peer-review systems, including some of the largest, to build web services that can be incorporated into existing systems to test these strategies and visualize the results.

Emerging information technologies are enabling new forms of content delivery. Recent research shows that students are capable of writing a peer-reviewed textbook for their own course. The pedagogical advantages are numerous. Instead of being merely the consumers of knowledge, students become co-producers, along with the instructor. This forces them to learn the material in greater depth, and to reflect upon it more frequently. The natural medium for the creation of such a textbook is a wiki, because it standardizes the format and makes it easy for students to edit parts of a larger work. The proposed work brings together a faculty member with several years' experience in wiki textbook creation and a researcher with long experience in software for peer review of student-generated content. They propose to create a software system to manage creation and peer review of a wiki textbook, automating features such as rubric creation by students, double-blind feedback between author and reviewer, quality-control strategies for student peer reviews, and support for flow management to allow different chapters of the text to be written and reviewed at different times during the course.

Peer review is an active-learning technique that gives students the opportunity to interact with, and learn from, each other. Instructors are increasingly employing Web-based systems to manage the process. This opens wide new vistas for creating learning objects to enhance the educational experience. Instead of all students doing the same assignment, our Expertiza software allows each student or team to select from a list of tasks that will help enhance the course. Students submit their work, the work is peer-reviewed, and then the best work is chosen to be shared with the rest of the class. One task might be to devise an example that explains a difficult concept; another might be to improve a visualization of a topic covered in lecture; a third might be to write questions for a "mastery" quiz on a particular lecture. Successive classes can improve and extend the resources created in this way. Not only are these objects produced through active learning, but they offer active-learning experiences to those who use them later, to those who, for example, take the mastery quizzes or interact with the simulations produced through this process. Moreover, the learning objects produced with Expertiza can easily be published to a Web database accessible to other instructors for use in their classes. The Expertiza process has many concomitant benefits. It offers a way to produce high-quality educational materials with less investment of faculty time. It allows distance-education students to participate fully in active-learning exercises. It diminishes the opportunity for plagiarism because students don't all do the same assignment, and they build on the work of previous classes rather than duplicate it. It overcomes the handicap of teaching large classes, because large classes can produce many more resources. The proposed work is to deploy Expertiza in ten to twenty classes and measure the benefits. These range from ways of applying Expertiza in diverse subject fields, to comparisons of student performance in first-time Expertiza courses with later semesters in which students are using Expertiza-developed material from earlier semesters.

We propose to create a state-of-the-art environment for distributed extreme programming by marrying the Sangam editor, developed at NCSU, with the FaceTop user interface, developed at UNC-CH. Combining Sangam and the FaceTop will produce an integrated tool that will be a quantum leap forward for distributed extreme programming and distributed agile development.