As the "campus tsunami'' that is purportedly poised to change the face of higher education. Peer assessment has been adopted as a strategy to stimulate students' active engagement in learning in MOOCs. While it is considered an effective pedagogical strategy to empower students and support learning by some, it is regarded as one of the main criticisms by others. It has been the focus of the dispute among developers of MOOCs in the field in the past few years. Based on a case of the MOOC entitled, The Red Chamber Dream, on Coursera, this study aims to explore the relationship between the perception of usefulness of peer assessment. Peer assessment and the quality of learner assignments, and whether community knowledge is advanced in MOOCs facilitated by peer assessment. All notes related to learning in the discussion board were retrieved for further analysis. Notes indicating students' perceptions about peer assessment were downloaded for analysis. Finally, students' essays available on the course site were also saved in individual files for further analysis. Research found that there is no correlation between the quality of students' essay writing and note writing and the reported usefulness of providing feedback/grading to their peers. Results also suggest that no correlation exists between the quality of students' essay writing and note writing and the reported usefulness of receiving peer feedback. Meanwhile, results suggest that students were engaged in discussions and advanced their understanding. They produced a large number of explanations and knowledge building discourse, all of which involved knowledge advancement in each week. This improvement in knowledge may result in part from their expertise and in part from peer review of peers' work. However, we cannot identity improvement of students' work between different weeks Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), as one type of disruptive technology, has been described.

Keywords

massive open online course · MOOC · peer assessment