On-line peer review in teaching design-oriented courses

Peer review has been one of the very important design-facilitating processes practiced in education field, particularly in design-oriented courses such as MIT's 2.007 Robot Design. Typically students exchange ideas sketched on a piece of paper and critique on each other's design within a small team. We designed PREP web application backed up by a range of web services that handle the peer-review process on-line, and we argue that this is a significant step towards supporting design-oriented course on-line. We believe that the lessons learned could be applied to other interested institutes that offer design-oriented courses.