A professor at the University of Toronto, lacking funds to hire teaching assistants, decides to adopt a peer-review assessment model for work worth 10% his course grade. He develops a software application called PeerScholar that facilitates the student peer-review process. The union representing the teaching assistants takes him to court, since their collective agreement states that students cannot correct work without getting paid for it. The union wins their case. He appealed, and the court upheld their original decision. Now, the professor going back to his original method, where the assignments were marked entirely by software.

I'm not sure how the professor argued his case, but I would have positioned the student assessment as part of the learning process, which it is. As such, I cannot see the union being allowed to intervene in the classroom and dictate what teaching methods the professor can and cannot use.

I'm hoping that this news gets some more traction in academic news circles so that hopefully more details and reaction will emerge.

Update 1: I came across this related editorial at the NP: CUPE, proudly stopping progress:

PeerScholar was a research project worth pursuing for its own sake, but the Ontario Superior Court's support for CUPE's grievance means that the Joordens/Pare research will be very difficult to reproduce scientifically, under real-world conditions, inside Ontario. It also means that PeerScholar, as a made-in-Ontario software application, will be hard to sell to colleges and universities where teaching assistants are unionized. And the potential for Peer-Scholar to improve the quality of large first-year survey classes may never be realized. How often does a labour union, with one single action, harm science, education and business all at once? What an astonishing hat trick of ignorance and greed; doff your lids, readers.

Update 2: Here is a 2006 post from Rochelle Mazar that documents the beginning of this brouhahah.

(Original link via George Siemens)