iPeer is Going Away After Spring 2016 Semester

After Spring 2016, iPeer will no longer be available at UMass Amherst. The pilot of iPeer showed that, while peer evaluation tools are very valuable, iPeer itself did not meet our standards for stability and reliability. Instructors who rely on the features of a team formation and peer evaluation tool should consider using CATME, a similar application.

CONSIDER CATME

For instructors who still want to use a tool to assist with team formation and peer evaluation, UMass Amherst IT recommends CATME, a widely-used, no-cost Web application developed and hosted by faculty at Purdue University and other higher education institutions.

 

KEY DIFFERENCES BETWEEN iPEER and CATME

  • CATME is a more reliable, stable system that has been used by instructors at hundreds of schools across the world for over ten years.
  • Instructors upload student rosters into CATME, and can update that roster, including group membership, at any time (even while events are open).
  • CATME events can be reopened for individual students.
  • Peer evaluation questions have been selected by the CATME development team based on scientific evidence of their relevance, reliability, and validity, and cannot be directly edited by instructors. CATME’s Team-Maker tool has a wide range of established questions, and allows instructors to add their own questions.
  • CATME events open and close the beginning and end of instructor-specified days.
  • While CATME currently does not allow student comments to be released to other peers in their team, the CATME development team plans to have this feature to be in place for Fall 2016.

For more information on CATME, see: http://info.catme.org/

For questions about the end of the iPeer pilot or about CATME, please contact the Instructional Media Lab (instruct@umass.edu | 413-545-2823).

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