M37 - Moodle Workshop for peer assessment

Workshop is one way Moodle staff can set up student peer marking in Moodle. The activity can accommodate different kinds of submitted work and can happen before, alongside, or independently of the standard tutor assessment. Workshop lets staff set up forms, rubrics or marking guides to support students in making judgements. Student assessments can receive feedback only, or feedback and numeric grades. Tutors can optionally assess the student submissions and assessments, and weigh their own judgements in peer relations.  Peer submissions and assessments can be kept anonymous if needed. Workshop also allows self-assessment.

The basic stages of a Workshop activity, set out in more detail below, are:

1. Staff set up a Workshop assignment to which students will submit their work. This includes authoring instructions for submission and marking, setting how many pieces of work each student marks, by when, how allocated, whether anonymous, whether feedback only or numerically graded.

2. Students submit their work.

3. Students mark each others' work.

4. Tutors review the submissions and assessments, and optionally give their own marks for these.

5. Students receive the feedback and/or marks given by their peers and (if used) a mark from their Tutor for the assessments they have given.

6. A Tutor closes the activity, at which point the marks and feedback are revealed.

Peer marking requires students to make judgements about the work of their peers. Peer markers may be expected to give feedback only (which we'll refer to here as 'peer feedback'), or feedback along with a numeric mark (which we'll refer to as 'peer assessment').

A well-conceived, well-enacted peer assessment activity can advance:

• Students' ability to understand and work with assessment criteria.

• Students' ability in the authentic academic practice of peer review.

• Insights, through articulating judgements and producing constructive feedback, about how students can go about critiquing and improving their own work.

• The possibility of feedback that is quicker, more individualised, and more plentiful than tutors are able to provide. 

• The possibility of feedback on students' draft work, with sufficient time for amendments before its deadline.

• Avoiding 'learned dependence' (Yorke, 2003) - students' over-reliance on tutor opinions, and over-humility to the importance of their own understandings.

• Triangulation - the original submission, peer reviews and tutor assessment (not to mention self assessment where used) can be compared, giving students new perspectives on their submission, the criteria, and the reviews they have written.

• Relatedly, insights into subjectivity and governance in the assessment process.

• Also relatedly, a departure from monologic, transmissive feedback as students weigh up the differences in the reviews. This in turn promises a desirable change in the way feedback is received from simple certainties to more sophisticated, evaluative thinking (Schommer, 1990).

• An occasion for dialogue with tutors and peers about assessment.

Keith Topping (2009) suggests explaining to students,

• First time use of any new activity needs time and careful planning - especially one this coordinated and interpersonal. As you and your students repeat the process, it becomes far quicker and easier to run than the first time.

• Peer marking activities stand or fall on the strength of the explanations and instructions you give to students. These relate to the assessment criteria and the underlying theory of peer marking, as well as to the technology.

• Though the Moodle Workshop activity presents staff with a clear dashboard list (called the Planner) of who has and hasn't completed the two stages, it doesn't currently let you generate the same kind of participation reports as other Moodle activities. So if you have a very large cohort, we suggest using groups to make the list more manageable.

1. Switch the toggle to turn 'edit mode' on.  

2. Hover your mouse of the area of the course where you would like the Workshop activity to appear, and click the '+' Plus symbol (or go to the bottom of the section and select 'Add an activity or resource'),

3. Select 'Workshop'.

4. Complete the settings as detailed below. Keep in mind that what you put in the text fields of the settings has a crucial orientation role, displaying at certain times in certain places. We give guidance below.

5. Workshop name - this will display as the link to the activity, so make it concise and meaningful.

6. Enter whether the assessment is summative or formative.

 This displays for students on the front page of the activity just under the Planner (dashboard). Give a brief motivating introduction to the activity. (Instructions for each phase come later).

Grading strategy determines the assessment form used and the method of grading submissions.

There are 4 alternative grading strategies:

• Accumulative grading - each assessment criterion has its own numeric grade along with optional weighting and optional comments; a final grade is calculated on the basis of the separate grades and their respective weightings.

• Comments - no numeric grade but feedback only, as comments either in a single field or as responses to a series of guiding questions.

• Number of errors - markers decide whether the work they are marking has passed or failed each criterion (e.g. has original ideas; answers its question).

• Rubric - generates a numeric grade based on the level of achievement markers choose for each criterion. You'll be able to define your criteria and, for each criterion, as many levels as you need. The Rubric will display with a free text field for Overall Feedback. Do note that Rubric will generate a numeric grade and cannot be set to feedback only. In other words you will need to assign a single numeric grade to each level, and those marks must be unique. Note too that it is not currently possible to import or reuse rubrics created elsewhere.

Grade for submission and Grade for assessment allow you to set a maximum grade which can be obtained on a piece of work.

The Submission grade to pass and Assessment grade to pass boxes allow you to set a minimum grade required for students to pass the assessment. 

Instructions for submission display to students above the place where they submit their work. It is a good place to explain the settings and any conditions you have set up.

Maximum number of submission attachments - if set to none then students will need to paste their submission directly into a Moodle text field. Since Workshop does not have autosave, you might suggest they draft elsewhere and paste into Moodle. Alternatively you can allow files, in which case let students know how many you expect and in which format.

Submission attachment allowed file types - leaving this field blank allows students to upload all file types. Clicking 'Choose' allows you to create a list of allowed file types for student submission.

Late submissions - if late submissions are allowed there is no way to automatically allocate peer markers to them. You'll need to to manually allocate markers to these late submissions, or mark them yourself.

Instructions for assessment - this displays to students during the assessment phase and appears just under the Planner and above their allocation. Like the instructions for submission they are important for orienting and motivating students.

Use self-assessment - this allows students to be allocated their own work to assess.