Essay Writing in Online Education: introducing an iterative peer collaboration system

This study suggests a new peer learning and feedback system for essay writing assignment in Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) to increase a chance of collaborative learning and feeling of engagement among large number of students in MOOCs. In this system, each student will write an essay on an assigned topic, then review peer student’s essay. Students will be encouraged to employ ideas from peer's essay and comments from feedback to revise and develop the essay. We will observe the iterative process of feedback and idea development. We will evaluate changes of an essay at each iteration and find correlation with the scores as well as students’ sense of accomplishment.