My own experiences.
In the last five years, I have started digitizing campus courses and developing new online courses to be exclusively given to industrial professionals. Working in this new setting involves a close interaction with students using digital tools and blended learning. Nowadays, teaching has evolved and teachers are adopting blended learning techniques throughout the whole process of giving a course. I think that exploring and assessing the impact of blended learning is important in bringing more relevant learning experiences in these online courses. During the last week, I reflected on my experiences related to online courses on software testing given at Mälardalen University. These courses developed at Mälardalen University provide an understanding of the fundamental problems, as well as practical methods and tools for a systematic state-of-the-art approach to software testing.
I started with an example from these online courses, I teach most of the classes are taught asynchronously and assignments leverage online educational opportunities to virtually merge students. All groups in these courses are using the same learning platform, watching the same lectures, and reading and discussing the same subjects. One example of such a specific activity is an assignment in which students are summarizing, evaluating, and critiquing a certain scientific paper on software testing. In this chosen assignment, one student examines and critiques certain software testing papers while others have the opportunity to critique the original synopsis. Two students are designated as “skeptics” for each paper and are required to disagree with the posted synopsis and provide reasonable arguments. All students can join in the discussion for each paper throughout this assignment. This has worked well to some extent.
Best practices/lessons learned.
Peer review is a good way to provide a collaborative learning opportunity and the discussions are asynchronous, the aim is to focus on the learner and not the teacher, implying a more reliable understanding of the content.
An assignment that tries to create opportunities for literacy that emerges from a collective activity can be used to develop communities of praxis inside a course.
When knowledge takes action form and theories (i.e., papers and reports read by students) become a tool, and the application of such a tool (i.e., critique work during the assignment) is producing and reorganizing the experience needed for obtaining more understanding
Suggested tools
In one course, I used PIAZZA for asynchronous communication https://piazza.com/ and teams for online sessions.
testing habits 
Edi, I really like the concept of assigning sceptics for certain papers or aspects! I have been using peer review in my seminars, but this seems like a good add-on.
Assigning some roles to students and gamification the task is certainly a good idea. If I were your student, I would be happy to be “skeptic” 🙂 Thanks for sharing your experience, I will keep it in my mind for possible implementation in one of my courses maybe.
Thanks!
Thank you for your great insights and for sharing useful links that greatly contribute to our quality teaching.
I do agree that assigning roles to students who critically review a fellow student’s paper is a good idea. However, I wonder if “skeptics” are the only roles? What about those who are constructive (constructivists??). I often give this instruction to students: in a review discussion always have a constructive suggestion up your sleeve, but don’t give it away until the respondent has had the possibility to get there him/her self.