Leveraging the Potentials of Peer Learning

The digitization changes qualification demands of knowledge workers and opens new forms of collaboration. Solutions are required for enhancing acquisition and transfer of knowledge as well as training professional skills such as critical thinking, communication and cooperation.
Peer Learning (PL) provides potentials for coping with these demands. However, it faces practical challenges as its reusability is low, collaboration expertise is required, and lacks leveraging digitization potentials. In contrast, the body of Collaboration Engineering (CE) literature, provides insights as it is an approach to designing collaborative work practices for high-value recurring tasks and deploying those to practitioners to execute for themselves without collaboration expertise.
In this light, three research questions shape the structure of the thesis. First, the thesis shows an analysis of the application domain and develops a teaching-learning approach for creating conditions for PL in large scale lectures. Second, it proposes an approach to designing reference processes for enhancing PL. Third, it presents three studies that illustrate the design, instantiation and evaluation of reference processes for enhancing PL in the field. As methodological approach the thesis uses Design Science and develops, instantiates and evaluates re-usable reference processes for enhancing PL.