EdTech SaaS Platform: Scaling Collaborative Learning for 7000+ Students

The Client

Georgia Institute of Technology is a top-ranked public research university known for engineering and computer science excellence. In 2014, Georgia Tech launched the OMSCS program—one of the first large-scale, affordable online graduate degrees from a top-tier university. Individual courses regularly enrolled 500-1000 students, with some reaching 2000+ per semester.

The university recognized that traditional teaching methods don’t scale to thousands of students. Educational research shows peer feedback is one of the most effective learning techniques, but implementing it at Georgia Tech’s scale required purpose-built technology that existing learning management systems couldn’t provide.

The Challenge

Large-scale online education creates a fundamental problem: how do you enable active, collaborative learning with 7000+ students? A course with 1000 students doing peer review generates thousands of feedback submissions—no instructor team can manually verify quality.

The platform needed to handle 7000+ concurrent users, integrate seamlessly with Canvas LMS, guide students through structured feedback with calibration exercises, and run AI evaluation of feedback quality in real-time. It also needed to support various collaborative learning pedagogies and collect data for education research studies.

Our Solution

We founded and built Peer Feedback as a full-stack EdTech SaaS platform designed for large-scale online course management. The Canvas LMS integration enables one-click import of rosters, assignments, and submissions, with automatic peer review distribution and grade export.

The AI-powered feedback evaluation engine analyzes text in real-time, identifying whether feedback is specific and actionable versus superficial. Research-based pedagogies include calibration exercises where students practice giving feedback on sample submissions before reviewing peers’ work. The multi-tenant SaaS architecture handles 7000+ concurrent users with sub-second response times, maintaining 99.9% uptime.

The Impact

Peer Feedback has served 7000+ students at Georgia Tech since 2015, processing tens of thousands of peer feedback submissions. The AI evaluation system gives instructors real-time visibility into feedback quality at scale. The Canvas integration eliminated hours of manual data management. Research studies have shown that students who engage thoughtfully with peer review demonstrate better learning outcomes.

The platform validated that active learning techniques can scale to massive online courses with the right AI-powered tools. It continues to evolve at https://peerfeedback.gatech.edu and represents one of the most successful applications of AI to collaborative learning in higher education.