Learning about Deadlines from a Community of Learners

As we are regularly teaching university courses of 600-800 students, we are constantly looking for ways to create a meaningful educational experience for our students to counter the lack of individual mentoring. Therefore, we have been developing a learning platform customised to suit the needs of our students. Peer reviewing is a central component in this system where students hand in challenges and review the work of their peers to provide them with individual feedback. This paper reports on four designs regarding deadlines in this submission system. Our initial goal was an open submission system to allow for self-organisation; for the students to take responsibility of their own learning journey; and to foster a more self-directed and motivated learning culture. We discuss expected and unexpected repercussions caused by our design decisions from the perspectives of both the community of learners and the lecture staff. We evaluated different deadline designs, only to find that when we approached our 'ideal' design, the distribution of work throughout the semester had a highly negative impact on workload and stress levels for lecture staff as well as students. This insight led to a more traditional deadline design that still makes room for self-directed learning and promotes better input from the community of learners in the same deadline cycles.