Workshop Activity
Workshop is a peer assessment activity with many options. Students submit their work via an online
text tool and attachments. There are two grades for a student: their own work and their peer
assessments of other students' work.
Course participants actually get two grades in a single Workshop activity - grade for their submission
(that is how good their submitted work is) and grade for assessment (that is how well they assessed
their peers). Workshop activity creates two grade items in the course Gradebook and they can be
aggregated there as needed.
Typical Workshop is not a short-term activity and it takes up to several days or even weeks to
complete. The Workshop workflow can be divided into five phases. The teacher controls which
phase the workshop activity is in at any time. This tutorial will walk through the five phases.
1.
Setup phase - Teachers create and determine the workshop, students cannot do anything
2.
Submission phase - Students turn in work within a time frame
3.
Assessment phase - Peer assessment by students
4.
Grading/evaluation phase - Teacher grades submissions and peer assessments
5.
Closed phase - Final grade is calculated. Students may see grades and their work
Setup Phase
1. To create a workshop, make sure editing is turned on, and press Add an activity or resource. Now
click on Workshop, then click Add.
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Be sure to put your workshop in the topic you wish to relate the activity to.
2. Provide a name and introductory text for this activity.
The introductory text should inform students about the scope of the activity and give them a good
idea about what they will need to do.
3. Adjust the maximum marks for the activity
In the grade settings area, you can specify the maximum allowable mark for the student submission
as well as the maximum mark possible for their peer assessments.
- Choose the number of decimal places you wish to use when grading the activity.
- Determine and set the grading strategy for the activity.
There are four different types of grading strategies available for use.
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a. Accumulative Grading
In this case, the assessment form consists of a set of criteria. Each criteria is graded
separately using either a number grade (eg out of 100) or a scale (using either one of sitewide scale or a scale defined in a course). Each criterion can have its weight set. Reviewers
can put comments to all assessed criteria.
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b. Comments
The assessment form is similar to the one used in accumulative grading strategy but no
grades can be given, just comments. The total grade for the assessed submission is always
set to 100%. This strategy can be effective in repetitive workflows when the submissions are
firstly just commented by reviewers to provide initial feedback to the authors.
c. Number of Errors
The assessment form consists of several assertions, each of them can be marked as passed
or failed by the reviewer. Various words can be set to express the pass or failure state - eg
Yes/No, Present/Missing, Good/Poor, etc.
d. Rubric
The rubric assessment form consists of a set of criteria. For each criterion, several ordered
descriptive levels is provided (Poor, Fair, Good, Excellent). A number grade is assigned to
each of these levels. (Poor = 1, Fair = 2, Good = 3, Excellent = 4) The reviewer chooses which
level answers/describes the given criterion best.
For the purposes of this tutorial we will be using the accumulative grading method.
4. Provide instructions for submission.
Create specific instructions for your students to follow. Tell them the specifics of what they need to
be submitting for review. It would be a good idea to mention the due date for submission in this
area as well, as in the example below.
-Specify any submission upload limits.
This area includes options for the number of attachments and the size limit of those
attachments.
-Determine if you wish to allow late submissions.
5. Provide instructions for assessment
Inform students of their assessment responsibilities, inform them of what criteria they will be
looking for, as well as the quality of assessment that you are looking for.
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6.
Decide whether to provide examples
If you check to use examples, the dropdown menu for Modes of example assessment opens.
Moodle will insert some practice examples for students to peer assess. Including the
examples and allowing students to work with them will help students to get acquainted with
the process before assessing their fellow students.
There are three ways you can incorporate the examples into the activity.
I. Examples are available after own submission and must be assessed before peer
assessment
This forces the students to practice their assessments and become familiar with the process
before they are able to evaluate any of their peers.
II. Examples must be assessed before own submission
This also forces the students to practice their assessments, but requires that the examples
are completed before they can even submit the assignment or assess others.
III. Assessment of example submission is voluntary
In this case the practice examples are not forced on students, but instead are there to
provide support if needed.
7. Set all the availability and due dates for submissions and assessments
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You must tick the enable box to be able to change the date fields. These fields are optional but do
control the flow of the activity and determine when submissions and assessments should occur.
8. Choose Save and Display
Note that you are taken to a screen with your introduction, as well as the steps and phases listed.
The initial setup of the activity completed certain steps for you.
9. Click on Edit assessment form in the Setup phase column
For this tutorial we choose to use an Accumulative grading method that allows grades and
comments to be submitted. However the students need to know what aspects of the submissions
they should be looking at. In the description fields provided, detail the criteria in which you wish
students to use in the peer assessment process. By default three aspect fields are provided, but you
can add more by using the "Blanks for 2 more aspects" button near the bottom of the page.
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-Note that you can also weight the aspects, when Accumulative grading is chosen. This means that
one aspect could hold more relevance to the assessment grade than other aspects.
-Choose Save and close once you are done editing the aspects. You can choose to preview the
assessment form as well by choosing Save and preview. This will provide you with a view of the
assessment form as your students will see it.
10. Add some example submissions
Because we specified for this tutorial that we are going to use example submissions, we must create
an example for students to assess. It would probably be a good idea to have good, fair and poor
examples so students can begin to understand the differences in the quality of work.
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Upon creating the examples you are also prompted to assess your example. The assessment you
complete will be used as a reference to your students. This practice also allows you to experience
your assessment and determine if you need to make any changes.
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When the example assessment is complete you will be taken to the main workshop editing page.
There you will notice the setup phase column now shows that you have completed the setup phase.
Submission Phase
Once you have setup your Workshop you will move on to the assessment phase. In this phase
instructors will need to allocate submissions to be reviewed by peers.
1. To enter into the Submission Phase you must complete the setup phase. At this point a light bulb
will appear in the Submission Phase column of the Workshop main screen.
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Click the light bulb to switch the workshop into submission phase. When you do this it will ask you if
you are sure if you would like to enter this phase as it does open the activity to submissions from
students.
When your students click on the workshop to get instruction and submit an assignment, they will see
the same chart the instructor does on the main page of the activity. The submission phase column
will be highlighted and will contain the deadlines for submission and will also inform students if late
submissions are allowed, etc.
Once students submit a file they are able to edit the submission (remove the files and other content)
until the submission deadline.
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2. Once submissions from students have been received and the deadline is past, you must then
allocate the submission for peer assessment. Click on the allocate submission link in the Submission
Phase Column.
You can manually allocate the submissions among your students, or you can use the random
allocation function.
Random allocation does a good job, but works within the confines of the Workshop Activity Settings.
If you are expecting 7 submissions but only 6 are submitted you are left unable to use the random
allocation method. For each participant you can allocate who will review their work as well as whose
work they will review.
Once your allocations are complete your students will be able to start assessing their peers, provided
that the open date workshop Assessment phase coincides with the current date.
Clicking on manual allocation will allow you to see the results from the random allocation. You can
make any changes you wish at this point as well.
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3. You are now able to switch to the assessment phase.
To switch to this phase be sure to click the lightbulb icon in the workshop activity chart.
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Assessment Phase
This phase is student driven and is completed by the students only. When students log in after
entering into the assessment phase they will see Assigned Submissions to assess as well as example
assignments to assess. For this tutorial the practice examples are set to optional so they do not have
to complete the examples.
As an instructor when you access the workshop activity during the assessment phase, you are able
to see which students have completed assessments and which have not.
1. To begin the assessment process, students need to navigate to the assigned submissions and click
the assess button for that submission
They will see the title, typed text by the student, as well as attached files.
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2. Grade and comment each aspect of the assignment for your peers.
After the peer content has been read (or during) one can enter comments and grades for each
aspect (general area to evaluate).
3. Click save to continue.
Once you have completed your assessment you can choose to save and continue or save and close.
Saving and continuing will take the student to the next peer assessment assigned to them. Save and
close will return to the main page of the activity and gives the students the possibility to re-assess
until the assessment deadline.
Once all peer assessments are complete you can move on to the next phase of the workshop
activity. Each student is informed by Moodle if they have not completed all their duties in the
assessment phase. If all assessments are done, the students will have a check box for assessing peers
in the Assessment phase column.
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Grading and Evaluation Phase
The name of this phase is deceiving because it implies that you as an instructor will be giving a
separate grade to each student. However this is not the case. This phase allows you to see the peer
assessments and comments and determine if the peer assessments have been completed properly.
If the instructor strongly disagrees with the evaluations he or she can choose to override the grade
and provide the author of the submission with more feedback.
When you enter the assessment phase you will see Grading Evaluation Settings and below it the
peer evaluations combined and calculated by Moodle.
1. To being you should first choose your evaluation settings.
The evaluation settings within Moodle help calculate the grades given for assessment. In other
words it helps calculate the grade the students receive for assessing their peers. The formula takes
into account all the grades given for a particular submission and compares them to see how close in
range the marks are. For an example, assume there are 4 assessments total with a range of marks as
follows: 90, 92, 89, and 68. The mark 68 will most likely be flagged and the student who submitted
that mark will receive a lower grade because their assessment does not seem to coincide with the
other peer assessment.
The Comparison of assessments setting allows you to adjust the strictness of the formula. If you
choose the comparison to be very strict, students whose evaluation differ drastically from the
average will be penalized for their assessment. If you choose very lax, then the penalty will not be as
large.
NOTE: The comparison method looks for 3 or more peer assessments. If only 2 or less are available,
the formula cannot determine which grade is more likely. Students will more than likely receive full
marks for the grades given if, even if the assessments differ drastically. A work around will be
explained below.
2. Click on a student submission link located in the submission column within the chart of
submissions and assessments.
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The page that appears will have the student submission, including the text submitted and any
attached files. As an instructor you can download and read any submissions. After reading the
submission you can look over the other student assessments and see if their grades and comments
are valid. A grade and comments are shown for the different aspects you asked the students to
assess each other on.
3. Review the Peer Assessments
Do the comments and grades make sense. Is the mark given valid. If not, you can override the
reviewers grade.
4. Override grades and change weighting if necessary
If you disagree with all the reviews, you can override the grade at the bottom of the page in the
feedback for the author section. This will override all the assessments.
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You may just disagree with one assessment. There are a couple of ways to handle an improper
review. First you could click on the button Assessment Settings of the Reviewer and and overide the
grade for that assessment only.
This also allows you an opportunity to provide the reviewer with feedback so they understand why
their grade was overridden. Grades that are overridden will also have an affect on the grade the
reviewer receives.
If you wish the peer assessment to be authentic as a group assessment, and you don't want to
remove the poorly done assessment, but do not want it to affect the submitting students grade as
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drastically, you could also change the assessment weight of the reviews to have a higher weighting
for the appropriately completed assessments and a lower waiting for the poorly done assessments.
5. After overriding all grades etc, make sure you click the Re-calculate grades button to ensure that
Moodle has updated the grades according to your changes.
6. Click the light bulb icon in the closed column of the workshop activity to end the activity and
submit the final marks to the grade book.
If you feel you are done with all the grading and evaluation make sure you end the activity and
submit grades.
You can always go back and edit grades etc via the workshop activity by opening up past phases of
the activity, or by overriding them via the grade book.
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