Adapting Educational Resources for Collaborative On-line Peer Review

Abstract

This thesis looks at a computer-mediated communication (CMC) and publishing system used to facilitate collaborative peer review of multimedia educational objects. The occurrence of electronic scholarly publishing has increased dramatically in recent years due in part to the immediacy and overall reach of the Internet and it’s ability to transmit diverse forms of electronic media. Previous studies indicate, however, that there is a perceived lack of prestige and legitimacy associated with electronic journals as well as electronically enabled peer review. This is due in part to a perceived lack of permanence associated with electronic media, a lack of familiarity with electronic media and a lack of fully developed conventions of citation. New forms of electronically based peer review have been explored that enable a collaborative review process among reviewers and authors, breaking from traditional models where communication channels are mediated through an editor. The ability of CMC to enable collaboration within geographically dispersed communities offers strong motivation for its use. This thesis develops a framework for collaborative peer review based on social capital that suggests an overall benefit for scholarly communities that incorporate collaborative forms of review. An examination is performed of collaborative peer review used in a new journal that features multimedia-rich geoscience educational objects: the Journal of Earth System Science in Education (JESSE). Technical issues surrounding the preparation of these objects for the CMC review environment are discussed and a process model for publishing is developed. A redesign of the toolkit used to prepare objects for the review environment is implemented and task-centered usability assessments are performed. The outcome of these steps suggested a potential for increased legitimacy and prestige of electronic publishing could develop out of a well-designed CMC environment and collaborative review model. It was found that scholars who participated in the peer review perceived a benefit from the collaborative process and that the process was seen as providing a separate service from traditional peer review. On the publishing end, the redesigned toolkit implementation was seen as providing greater accessibility to non-technically oriented users.