This article evaluates a curriculum based on a peer-learning model between Israeli students whose Hebrew is their mother tongue and peer students from around the world who study Hebrew as a foreign language. The aim of the program is to improve foreign language discourse skills.

Multicultural Dialogue

Students benefited from online peer instruction as a community of learners who developed professionally through dialogue and social involvement with others. The students not only learned about the teaching profession but also about themselves as people in general and as future teachers. They became active members of a learning community. Adopting the theory of an experiential community is a valuable means of understanding the professional development of teachers, who share their experiences with others, become active members in the community, and simultaneously reflect on and refine their own teaching skills (McLoughlin et al., 2007).

Program Evaluation

Formal program evaluation is a systematic collection of information about an activity, which is then used in decision-making regarding the program and its impact (Patton, 1978). However, some view evaluation as a daily activity that is carried out whenever we must decide. This type of evaluation is based on intuition and is different from formal evaluation. According to House (1993), science was accepted as a basis for decision-making by those with authority. The legitimacy of scientific decision-making is based on a perception of data as comprising hard and unobtrusive facts that are used to justify decisions.

Online Peer Learning

The main components expressed in the process are peer education as part of a community of learners and the qualities of their interaction in a multicultural environment. Heron et al. (2003) defined five ways of peer instruction; the peer learning program adopted the third way, whereby peer education involves two persons: a mentor, who is knowledgeable and capable, and a learner, who is less knowledgeable. According to Colvin (2007), peer education is perceived as a relationship in which two persons of similar age and similar experience meet to achieve a professional goal, such as information sharing, formulating professional strategies, and psychosocial support. Furthermore, according to Beattie (2000) and Terrion and Leonard (2007), peer learning enables the exchange of ideas and learning with others through the joint construction of meanings and understandings, and through interrelationships between three components: cognitive (what we learn), affective (why we learn), and metacognitive (how to learn).

Program Description

The peer learning program is a model of curriculum planning for discourse-based communicative approaches to language learning, which lead to well-assimilated grammatical knowledge. It is based on peer learning that is structured as an open matrix directed at meaningful learning and understanding. The program is multi-directional and surrounded by intersecting foci and significant network connections. It emerges through participants' actions and interactions. The peer learning community comprised 46 students from Tel Aviv, Israel; Denver, Colorado; Beijing, China; and Melbourne, Australia.

In peer learning, students from Israel evaluated, using online feedback, the performance of other students from around the world in a shared learning process. According to Levin-Rozalis, Lapidot, and Dover (2007), evaluation is research dealing with real-life issues in the lives of people and their interactions with other individuals and social bodies. Therefore, there must be a clear idea regarding the area we wish to improve and what sort of improvement is needed.

The peer learning program is examined considering the CIPP model developed by Stufflebeam (2002). This model does not depend on the program’s goals; instead, program evaluators conduct an ongoing dialogue with the complex context of the evaluated program, which they regard as a process and not a final product (Stufflebeam, 1966, 1983).

Research Method This research is a qualitative and theory-based study. The peer learning community comprised 46 students as follows: seven teacher trainees from Israel, in the second year of an academic conversion program to become teachers of Hebrew as an additional language; nine students from the University of Denver, Colorado, who chose to study Hebrew at the Centre for Jewish Studies; 15 students from the Hebrew Department at the Peking University, China, and 15 students from the Hebrew Department of the University of Languages in Melbourne, Australia. The peer learning program was accompanied by a Hebrew-language lecturer from each of the participating countries and by a lecturer from Israel whose expertise is teaching Hebrew as an additional language. The research data were collected from a digital portfolio that was written during the school year and includes three parts: (a) documentation (b) reflective process (c) metacognitive process. Only the Israeli students wrote parts (A and C). Reflections on the learning process were written by all the participating students after each session during the year. The contents of the digital collection were analyzed by each of the researchers. Judgments were made between judges and the main themes were emphasized. Reliability among judges was 86%. The findings were analyzed using Stuffelbeam's (2002) CIPP model, which includes four complementary evaluations, each of which enables to collect and analyze data of the intervention plan and thus supply useful information to the decision makers and leaders of the program. The evaluations are as follows: (1) Context: description and operation of the program; (2) Input: description of social-cultural-educational interactions; (3) Process: description of the pedagogical context in a multicultural environment; (4) Product: description of socio-cultural-educational outputs. This research illuminates the aspect of online peer instruction from different countries around the world in a multicultural and multilingual environment, whose aim is to promote oral discussion skills in another language. The proposed operational model can be used in any educational and academic framework in the world to broaden and promote a pluralistic, multicultural worldview, tolerance, and empathy towards others. All participants gave their consent to participate in the program and research. They knew that the data collected during the peer learning program would be used for evaluation and academic research, with the aim of providing a feasible and accurate response to the various needs of program participants in coming years. Participant privacy was safeguarded, and all names are pseudonyms.

Context - We will describe the framework and its operation. In the first stage, Israeli teachers prepared six online teaching units. In the second stage, dates were set for future encounters with peers from different countries. In the third stage students from Israel sent a link to their foreign peers with all sorts of lesson-related materials. In the fourth stage, the pre-planned hour-long encounters took place. In the fifth stage, the Israeli students wrote a report and a reflection that was kept in a three-part electronic portfolio. Input -We will describe the socio-cultural and scholastic interactions among the peers in the learners’ community. The community under discussion was based on DuFour’s (2004) core principles for ensuring learning of all the participants, a culture of cooperation, and a focus on the most important objectives. Process - We will describe the pedagogical context of the multicultural environment that accompanies the experience of building and formulating knowledge through interaction between members of a learning community. Product - (1) For all the peer learning participants: “Fostering global multicultural qualifications”; (2) The main components for the Israeli teaching trainees: “Development of pedagogical skills” (3) For the non-Israeli students: Improving online Hebrew skills. We found that students faced challenges in three areas: (1) Technology: familiarity with communication platforms and overcoming technical difficulties; (2) Content: the choice of controversial and interesting issues that can create a quality debate; (3) Feedback: recognizing the existence of an assessment field from the perspective of a teacher-evaluator and practicing giving feedback. Peer learning exposed the students to the skills of learning together and increased their motivation to get to know others and construct new meanings about content, ways of teaching, and innovative pedagogy that emphasizes the involvement of learners, autonomous learning, personal responsibility, and self-regulation in the learning process.

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