Eli Review seeks to make it easy for instructors to promote a strong feedback culture so that students give, receive, and use helpful feedback during peer learning.
Origins of Eli Review
Eli Review (also known simply as “Eli” and pronounced EE-lie) was invented to support evidence-based teaching practices and facilitate rich peer learning environments. Invented in writing classrooms at Michigan State University, Eli became necessary because no technologies existed to support the feedback and revision cycles that lead to better learning and more effective writers.
Eli was invented by Jeff Grabill, Bill Hart-Davidson, and Mike McLeod, all faculty in the Writing, Rhetoric, & American Cultures department at Michigan State University and researchers in the Writing in Digital Environments Research Center.
More Info: see the original whitepaper for more on the concepts, assumptions, and theories behind Eli Review.
Development Team
Bill Hart-Davidson (@billhd) is an Associate Professor and an Associate Dean of Graduate Studies at Michigan State, where he teaches various forms of writing, user-experience design, and research. Bill studied English Education as an undergrad just as the World-Wide Web was being born, hence his enduring interest in all the new forms of writing and communication open to students and teachers. Bill earned a Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1999 and spent time at IBM and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute before coming to MSU in 2004. He has been inventing and testing new writing technologies at WIDE ever since.
Bill works closely with Mike and Jeff to guide Eli’s development and to make sure that it is consistent with trustworthy learning theory and good writing pedagogy from the inside out. He can be frequently found at the whiteboard sketching flow diagrams at a furious pace or in front of a group of teachers helping them to reimagine their classrooms as dynamic peer-learning spaces using Eli.
Jeff Grabill (@grabill) is the Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning, and Technology and a professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures department at Michigan State University. He helped found and direct the WIDE (Writing in Digital Environments) Research Center, which has produced a number of technologies for learning. Jeff earned a PhD from Purdue University in 1997 and worked at Georgia State University before coming to Michigan State in 2002 to build programs and research groups. Jeff focuses on research and faculty development associated with Eli and on helping to coordinate marketing.
Mike McLeod (@mcleodm3) is a graduate of the Rhetoric and Writing program at Michigan State. Having completed both of its MA programs (Critical Studies in Literacy and Pedagogy as well as Digital Rhetoric and Professional Writing), he was well prepared as both a teacher and a user-centered designer. Jeff and Bill recruited him right out of the degree program to work with them at the WIDE Center, where he led the R&D process for many projects, including the one that eventually became Eli. The three of them collaborated on designs and Mike built and maintained the first Eli prototypes, lovingly referred to as the “MacGuyver Code” versions. Until May 2019, Mike was Eli’s head of product, responsible for design, development, maintenance, and support.
Melissa Graham Meeks earned her PhD in Rhetoric and Composition from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After directing a writing program at Wesleyan College, she taught first-year writing at Georgia Tech as a Brittain Fellow. Melissa joined Bedford/St. Martin’s in 2011, and her work focused on helping instructors customize media to meet their course goals. She joined the Eli Review team in April 2015 as the Director of Professional Development, where her primary responsibility is helping instructors get great results. Amongst the services she provides, Melissa can help instructors understand how Eli works, how to adapt a wide variety of courses to include Eli, interpret and act on Eli’s powerful formative feedback, or capture data for classroom research and publication.
Research & Development
Eli is actively developed by Drawbridge, Inc, an educational technology company founded in East Lansing, MI, that seeks to make ideas into great technologies that enhance teaching and facilitate learning. Drawbridge is a company spun out of Michigan State University.
See our Research site for more information about the theories on which Eli was built and to learn about possibilities for partnering with Eli Review to advance that scholarship.
