Improving report writing by peer assessment using Coursera

Report writing is a general engineering competence and it should therefore be part of any university engineering education to learn how to write a good report. Active leaning methods are well-known to be effective in supporting student learning; hence it should preferably also be used for teaching report writing. In the case of report writing active learning could include peer evaluation which is what is investigated in this paper. This paper presents a case study from the Technical University of Denmark. A course on mobile communication was redesigned to include peer evaluation as a tool for improving report writing skills. The peer evaluation process was automated using the elearning tool Coursera. What was investigated was the improvement in report writing as well as the consistency and quality of the peer assessed grades.