Contributing Student Learning With The Peerwise Tool At The Matej Bel University

Contributing student pedagogy requires students to produce artifacts (contributions) for the purpose of contributing to other peers' learning, and encourages students to value these peer contributions. A free web-based tool called PeerWise was created by Paul Denny at the University of Auckland to provide support for the implementation of contributing student pedagogy. It supports the authoring of multiple choice questions that other students can use and provide feedback on. A lot of institutions throughout the world use PeerWise. This paper describes case studies of various approaches to the use of the PeerWise system within 8 computer science courses taught by 3 teachers at the Matej Bel University (Introduction to Informatics, Semestral Project, Database Systems and Multimedia courses). We successfully used this system in 7 courses. The system was used by 273 students during 2 academic years (from summer semester 2014 until winter semester 2015). We used it as a presentation tool, motivation tool, learning tool for preparing for exams, exploring tool for understanding the design of this system for educational purposes. Our students like to use this system if they see the benefit of it for their learning and for passing the courses. So this is a task for their teachers to better understand the possibilities of the system and to motivate themselves to effectively use this system in their courses.