Roman Rietsche

The amount of online reviews is growing significantly. Between 2014 and 2017 the number of reviews for TripAdvisor grew by 300% and for Yelp by 208%. However, not all online reviews are equally valuable. Some reviews are perceived to be more helpful or trustworthy then others. Hence, a plethora of scholars have investigated the role of online reviews and researched factors and characteristics determining its helpfulness. Nevertheless, mixed findings were found. Consequently, the purpose of our paper is to present a holistic and representative analysis of the literature on factors indicating the helpfulness of online reviews. In total, we analyzed 81 journal articles and inductively created a framework resulting in four dimensions: review-related factors, reviewer-related factors, reader related factors and environment-related factors. The results reveled that researchers mainly focused on factors of the first two dimensions and that the findings are inconsistent and need to be solved by future research.

The skills students need today, have changed over the last decades. The required skills shift more and more towards higher order thinking skills such as critical thinking, collaboration and communication. One of the main factors to practice these skills is through formative feedback. Which in our setting consist of self-assessment and peer-assessment. However, today’s lecturers are facing the challenge that the amount of students per lecture continuously increases, while the available budget stagnates. Hence, large scale lectures often lack feedback caused by the scarcity of resources. To overcome this issue we propose a teaching-learning scenario, using IT to provide formative feedback at scale. In this paper, we are focusing on the students providing feedback skill, which is important for collaborative tasks. In our experiment with around 101 master students, we were able to show that the students ability to provide feedback significantly improved by attending IT-based peer feedback iterations.

Feedback is one of the most influential factor when it comes to learning success of students. Especially large-scale classes at universities often lack feedback caused by the scarcity of resources. Even though a lack of feedback is problematic across all domains, especially when educating future IS executives, who are supposed to lead team members by providing effective feedback. In this study, we use IT-based peer assessment (ITPA) in a large-scale class to support students with feedback during their learning-process. Specifically, our results show that participating in ITPA lead to an increase in knowledge on the content of the class of about 28% on average. Furthermore, students train their ability to provide feedback, measured twice, self-reported and as quality of the feedback received – increased significantly during the class.

Feedback is one of the most influential factor when it comes to learning success of students. Especially large-scale classes at universities often lack feedback caused by the scarcity of resources. Even though a lack of feedback is problematic across all domains, it is especially crucial when aiming to educate future managers, who are supposed to lead team members by providing effective feedback. In this study, we use problem-based-learning and a constructivist learning environment using IT-based peer assessment (ITPA) in a large-scale class to support future managers with feedback during the teaching-learning process. By implementing ITPA, we ensure on the one hand that our students regularly receive feedback, and one the other hand, we additionally support our students in training their ability to provide constructive feedback. While the results of our research show that the conspicuous value of ITPA is the increase of the students learning success and the hidden value is that at the same time the students train their ability to provide feedback. Specifically, our results show that participating in ITPA could lead to an increase in knowledge on the content of the class of about 28% on average. Furthermore, the students’ ability to provide feedback – measured twice, self-reported and as quality of the feedback received – increased significantly during the semester.

Over the last years, the number of students has constantly risen while the number of lecturers remained steady. To the consequence are large-scale classes with often hundreds of students. Large-scale classes have didactical challenges such as providing effective feedback for the students’ learning success. This is in particular problematic, since feedback belongs to the most influential factors for the student learn-ing success. In order to overcome the challenges of providing feedback in large-scale classes, we sug-gest using an IT-based solution we label digital formative learning assessment tool (DFLAT). In this research-in-progress paper, we will show the development of this tool by using the method of action design research (ADR). More precisely, we will concentrate on the first part from the requirements gathering to the alpha-version. In order to collect the requirements, we conducted expert interviews with lecturers and students and also derived requirements from scientific literature. Based on the re-quirements, we will define the key design elements of the first version of DFLAT. The next steps in our research are then the intervention and evaluation of our alpha-version in a large-scale lecture. With our completed research, we aim to contribute to literature by developing a theory of design and action for providing individualized feedback for students in large-scale classes.