The Moodle Workshop activity is a peer assessment activity with many many options. It allows participants to submit and assess each other’s projects in a number of ways. It also coordinates the collection and distribution of these assessments. Students can receive points and grade for both their submission and for their assessment of others work.
In Moodle 1.9, it is disabled by default because the code has not been kept up to date as much as other modules, however it has been patched, does work albeit sometimes difficult to understand. However, it has been totally re-written for Moodle 2.0 and I must admit to being very impressed!
In the new workshop there are is a core concept you need to understand to be able to use it, and that is the Workshop Phases. There are five stages:
- Setup
- Submission
- Assessment
- Grading/evaluation
- Close
All workshops start in the setup phase. The teacher can prepare the guidelines for submission, assessment and create the rubric for peer review. However, unusable by students in this phase except see the workshop.
During the Submission phase students can now submit (and re-submit) their assignment. Once they are all submitted the Teacher can then allocate the submissions to other students for peer-review.
The assessment phase is what it says. During this phase students assess the assigments assigned to them. This is the last phase in which students actually do anything.
The Grading and Evaluation phase is a teacher only phase. Teachers can now review assignments, and review the student assessments. Additionally, they can calculate or override the grades and provide feedback on the submission and on the assessment.
Once the 4th phase is complete, the workshop is closed and grades get published into the gradebook.
Now, not every workshop needs to have peer review as part of it, the 3 core feature options which control how it works are:
- Examples – Where Teachers can add examples answers and users can practise evaluating on example submissions
- Peer assessment – where users perform peer assessment of others’ work
- Self assessment – where users perform self assessment of their own work
The below video goes through all the basics of the student and the teacher interaction with a workshop.
This screencast shows the steps required in Setting up the Workshop.
For more information on the Workshop check out the following links
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Workshop_module
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Workshop_2.0_testing
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Workshop_2.0_specification
