It is often valuable to have students review one another’s work. In Moodle, the Workshop activity helps to make this easier to manage. There are a few more steps required for both instructors and students than in the standard Assignment activity, but these steps help students and the instructor throughout the rest of the process.
There are five phases in managing a Workshop activity:
- Setup Phase
- Submission Phase
- Assessment Phase
- Grading evaluation Phase
- Activity is Closed
In this article, we’ll talk about how to set up a Workshop, and the important decisions to make as an instructor. For more information, including step-by-step instructions, see the Moodle Workshop Module documentation page.
First, think about your objectives in using a Workshop activity. Peer assessment can have a number of advantages, including making students more consciously aware of the standards of good scholarship, giving students practice in evaluation (itself a high-order learning objective), and providing students with feedback on their work from multiple viewpoints. Is your intent to provide students with an opportunity to receive input on an early draft of a major project? Or is this evaluation activity in itself a major component of the course?
The Workshop activity provides two components to the student’s grade: the grade assigned by peer reviewers, and a grade on the quality of the student’s own review participation. The instructor decides the relative importance of these components, based on the intended purpose of the Workshop activity. For example, if a Workshop activity is worth 100 points total, the default values are 80 points for the “Grade for submission,” (the grade for the student’s own work) and 20 points for the “Grade for assessment” (the grade for the student’s reviews of other students’ work). The instructor also decides who assigns these grades. The “Grade for submission” can be an average of the other students’ reviews and assigned grades, or a self-assessment by the student, or can be manually set by the instructor. The “Grade for assessment” can be automatically calculated based on how consistent the student was with other students in ranking the same assignments (if there are 3 or more reviewers per submission), or manually set by the instructor.
If the assignment is an early draft of a major project, you may want to emphasize the importance of preparing good early drafts, so the student ratings (with suitable supervision) may be the main component of the grade, with the grading activity largely being a “valid participation” indicator. You might even choose the “Comments” grading strategy, which only allows each reviewer to comment on the work in specific categories, not assign a grade (a default of 100% is assigned when the comments are entered). In that case you may manually assign a grade for this early draft, or ask the student to self-grade.
On the other hand, if the purpose of the exercise is to develop better evaluation skills in the students, you may assign more weight to the “Grade for assessment” component. In that case, it will be particularly important to provide Example Submissions, which can be assignments from previously taught sections, or examples drawn from published works, or your own constructed examples, as appropriate. You must then assess each of these examples using the criteria you define for this activity. Your students will be able to compare their assessments of these examples to yours, before continuing on to assess one another’s work. Students can also see these samples before uploading their own work.
Four “Grading Methods” are provided:
|
|
Comments |
Number of errors |
Accumulative |
Rubric |
|
Allows comments |
Y |
Y |
Y |
Y |
|
Requires comments |
Y |
N |
N |
N |
|
Allows student to grade |
N |
|
Y |
Y |
|
Multiple Grade levels per Aspect |
N |
N |
Y |
Y |
|
Grade Levels Provide Definition (Rubric) |
N |
N |
N |
Y |
|
Best used for: |
Early drafts and low-weight assignments |
Inexperienced reviewers when more specific feedback is desired, medium-weight assignments |
Experienced reviewers, med-high weight assignments |
Inexperienced reviewers when quality of review is important, Teaching Assistants |
Other options:
Workshop features: If developing evaluation skills is a major factor of this assignment, provide example submissions. Note that it is possible to use the Workshop tool without peer or self assessment– this provides a structured rubric for assessing student work, perhaps by a grading assistant.
Grading Settings: Set the values of the “Grade for submission” and “Grade for assessment” to reflect the relative importance of these two factors.
Submission settings: The main decision here is whether to allow submissions after the deadline. Remember, in a peer activity, everyone is held up if one person is allowed to be late.
Assessment settings: If you provide examples, you may require students to view them before their own submission, or you may require students to submit their work first, then practice with the example before engaging in peer assessment. Again, if the primary purpose of the assignment is to build evaluation skills, it makes sense to have students complete a sample assessment before submitting their own work.
There are additional factors to be considered during the Submission Phase. These will be addressed in a future article.