Trialling a peer assisted teaching scheme

Application:

Trialling a Peer Assisted Teaching Scheme in the Australian Tertiary Education Sector

This project trialled a Peer Assisted Teaching Scheme in five universities across Australia, and was an extension of a project supported by an ALTC Teaching Fellowship in 2010 at Monash University. The aim of the trial was to implement a structured and collegial approach to supporting academic teaching staff to reinvigorate their units. The outcomes of the project included the development of tailored PATS workbooks, completed by the participants during the trial. Unit evaluation data has been collated and focus group sessions have been held for all participants. The analyses of these have resulted in multiple publications and presentations. Online newsletters (May 2012, Oct 2012 and Feb 2013) have been posted regularly updating on project progress, introducing project members and outlining preliminary results. The challenges encountered included: recruiting a new project officer halfway through the project, difficulties recruiting and coordinating participants and technical issues with the online PATS resources. A further difficulty with the cross-institutional trial was the different unit evaluation scoring measurements used at the institutions making comparisons of results across universities difficult. PATS was well received in its multi-institutional trial version. The success of the scheme led to the OLT National Senior Fellowship and coordinators will continue to run the scheme in 2013. Several joint publications about the PATS experiences by authors from different disciplines and universities are underway as a result of the trial and further analysis is expected.