A Moodle Workshop is a peer assessment activity. Workshops allow participants to upload projects for structured peer review, and it coordinates the distribution and collection of these reviews. The key to the Workshop is the scoring guide, which is a set of specific criteria for making judgments about the quality of a given work. This helps to provide a framework for both instructor and peer feedback on open-ended assignments, such as essays and research papers.

Creating a Workshop

Creating a Workshop is a three-step process: first, you need to add the Workshop to your course. Second, you need to create a scoring guide. Third, if you want to give your students example assignments to practice on, you need to upload these as well.

Adding a Workshop

1. Turn Editing Mode on.

2. Select Workshop from the Add Activity menu in the section where you want to place the link.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. Add a title and description.
4. Select the maximum grade for the workshop assignment.
5. Choose a grading strategy from these five options:

No grading: Students don’t give each other grades, only comments.

Accumulative grading: The submitting student’s final grade will be calculated based on the cumulative grades received from her peers within each of the dimensions.

Error Banded grading: You will create a rubric with only Yes/No decisions for the peer reviewer. Later, you will create a grade table that determines the final score based on the number of Yes/Nos.

Criterion grading: You will create a set of statements used to rank the assessment, each with an associated suggested grade.

Rubrics: Each element in a rubric is scored on a five-point scale, with each point illustrated by an example of the performance. Reviewers select the level of quality on each element by comparing the submission with the example.

6. Pick the number of comments, assessment elements, grade bands, criterion statements or number of dimensions for the rubric. Each of these will reflect a different aspect of the performance during scoring.
7. Decide if you will allow resubmissions. If turned on, Moodle will randomly pick one of the submissions each time someone reviews the student’s work.
8. Choose a number of assessments of example assignments from the teacher. As mentioned above, these will be uploaded later.
9. Determine the number of peer reviews a student must perform.
10. Choose whether self-assessment is required.
11. Select whether assessments must be agreed on by peers. If turned on, comments that the student being reviewed does not agree with will be sent back to the reviewer for revision before they are accepted.
12. Set a maximum upload size for an assessment.
13. Set the deadline for submission and review of the assignment.

 

14. Click Save Changes and you will be taken back to the course’s main page.

 

Creating Scoring Guides

Unless student grading is turned off, you will have to create scoring guides for the students to use as they peer-review. Here are instructions for how to do this for accumulative, error-banded, criterion, and rubric-based grading.

 

Accumulative Grading:

1. Click on the workshop you created in your main course page. You will be taken to the Editing Assessment Elements page.
2. For each assessment element you created when you set up the workshop, you will see a description, scale, and weight entry.
3. Enter the first performance dimension you want students to assess when looking at their peers’ work. (Each dimension should evaluate a critical aspect of the performance.)
4. Select a scale for the element. Remember, the scale itself doesn’t affect the weight given to that element. A 2-point Yes/No scale can be worth as much or more than a 100-point scale.
5. Set the weight of the element. The weight scale can be between 1 and 4 (the default is 1).
6. Repeat the process for each element you selected for your rubric.
7. Click Save Changes.

 

Error-banded Grading:

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Click on the workshop you created in your main course page. You will be taken to the Editing Assessment Elements page.
2. Enter a description of each element. These are the elements reviewers will make yes/no decisions about.
3. Click Save Changes.

 

Criterion Grading:

1. Click on the workshop you created in your main course page. You will be taken to the Editing Assessment Elements page.
2. Enter a set of criteria for grading the submission. (Criteria can be cumulative or self-contained, and should be in order of either increasing or decreasing quality.)
3. Enter a suggested grade for each criterion. (The grades should also be in order.)
4. Click Save Changes.

 

Rubric Grading:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Click on the workshop you created in your main course page. You will be taken to the Editing Assessment Elements page.
2. Enter a description for an element in the rubric form.
3. For each of the possible grade values, write a description of what a performance at that level would look like. If possible, use examples from previous student work.
4. Do the same for each of the elements that you want to be graded.
5. Click Save Changes.

 

Managing Workshops

Once you’ve set up your workshop, you will need to manage student submissions and evaluation. Fortunately, the workshop makes it easy to track student activity as it happens.  After you click "Save Changes" in the Scoring Guide section, you will be taken to the Managing the Assessment Page. Below the description of the assignment, you will see six tabs. They each display one step of the Workshop setup and delivery process. Here are the tabs:

 

Set Up Assignment
This is where you upload example assignments for students to review. (See below.)

 

Allow Student Submissions
Turn this on to allow students to score the example assignments, upload their own work, and complete self-assessments.

Allow Student Submissions and Assessments
Turn this on to allow students to score other students' work in addition to performing all of the actions listed above

Allow Student Assessments
Once this phase is activated, students can no longer upload their own work, but they can do everything else listed above.

Calculation of Final Grades
When all assessments are done, you can go through and set weights for each of the components of an assessment.

Display Final Grades
Display the results to your students.