Peer assessment between students of energy in buildings to enhance learning and collaboration

In educational settings, peer assessment is defined as the process of considering the level, value, worth, quality or success of the outcomes of learning by classmates with the same status (i.e. peers). In the framework of an educational innovation project at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), peer assessment has been implemented during two years in the course of “Energy in Buildings. In this subject, students individually develop their own project, mainly based on software tools, and apply the knowledge and skills learned within the course. The goal of peer assessment in this course is, not so much to increase student’s marks, but to increase their learning outcomes. The resulting classroom setting also allows a smoother transition to real-life professional settings and the development of interpersonal skills with future co-workers.A learning management system was utilized: Aula Global, virtual platform for students at UC3M, that is based on Moodle. Peer assessment was enabled by using the workshop activity in Moodle platform. To guide the assessment by the students, rubric templates were generated in the same virtual platform. This paper presents the lessons learned during the last year of application of peer assessment in “Energy in Buildings” course.