Workshops

Workshop is a powerful peer (and self) assessment activity. This quick guide takes you through the basics of setting up a workshop for your students.

A few things to know:

• A workshop moves between different phases. You can set timings for some phases to automatically progress, if you want, or use the workshop overview to move back a phase if necessary.
• Teachers and TAs can also leave feedback for student submissions in the workshop; ask us for help setting that up!
• Clicking the question mark icon  next to any setting you don't understand will display extra help.

Setting up your workshop

• In the course where you want your workshop, turn on the editing and from the Activity Chooser, select 'Workshop'.
• Give it a name and a description telling students what the workshop is about.
• If you're not sure about the Grading settings, leave them as default. Students get two grades - one for the work they submit and one for the quality of their peer assessments. You can change the default 80% and 20% if you wish and you can also set passing grades for both scores. It is usually only the students who do the assessing, although you as a teacher can assess too, and you can change individual student grades later on if you think it is necessary.
• The Submission settings is where you tell them what they must do for this task. They can type directly into Moodle or upload one or more files. You can let them submit late if you wish and you can specify which file types they are allowed to upload.
• The Assessment settings is where you tell them briefly what they are looking for when assessing the work of their peers. Don't give detailed instructions because this will be done later. You can let them assess their own work too, based on the more detailed criteria you will add later.
• Feedback will give the students the option of typing in some free text comments when they peer assess. You can make this optional, required or turn it off. They may also upload files as feedback, and you can specify which file types they may add. You can also add a conclusion to the workshop which will display when it is over.
• You might find it useful to give your students one or more Example submissions to practise on first. If you do, you can make them optional or required. You can force them to practise on any example submissions before they upload their own or afterwards before they do the peer-assessments.
• Think about whether, in the Availability section, you want the students to be given submissions to assess automatically once the submission deadline is over.

Workshop phases

Once saved, you will see the Workshop displayed like this:

You as teacher switch phases when you are ready by clicking the icon or text. The Setup phase will be highlighted because it's the phase you are in when you have just created the workshop.

Setup phase

• Click 'Edit assessment form' to provide detailed grading criteria for your students to use. When finished, click 'Save and close', and all ticks on the Setup phase will be the same colour.
• You are ready to switch to the Submission phase which lets students send in their work. Click the icon or text at the top of Submission phase. This phase will be highlighted.

Submission phase

• Students will now be able to submit their work during this time, until any deadline you specified - unless you also allowed late submissions.
• You allocate the submissions.
• Click the link 'Allocate submissions'
  • to decide if you yourself want to choose which student assesses whose work (Manual allocation),
  • or if you want Moodle to choose for you (Random allocation)
  • You can schedule a future random allocation in the third option.
• If, in the Availability section you set the workshop to switch to the submission phase automatically once the submission deadline is over, choose Scheduled allocation.

• You can see how many have submitted and how many still need to submit. Click the icon or text to move to the Assessment phase if you chose to switch phases yourself. The phase will be highlighted. (Remember that you can move back a phase if you need to, for example if you want to allow a student to resubmit.)

Assessment phase

• Students will assess the work of their peers according to the instructions and criteria you gave them.
• You can monitor their progress by looking at the grades underneath the phases screen:

• When you are ready, click the icon or text to move to the Grading evaluation phase. This phase will be highlighted.

Grading evaluation phase

• Here, Moodle calculates the final grades for submission and for assessment. This will be of less interest for most Hampshire users.  The page Using Workshop gives more details on how the grading works.
• You as teacher can change grades here if you need to.

Publish submissions: You can show to other students selected submissions if you wish. Click on a submission in the workshop grades report (image above) and scroll down to 'Feedback for the author'. Tick the box to publish this submission. Other students will see it once the workshop is closed.

Closing the workshop

When you are satisfied with the final grading, click the icon or text to close the workshop. The Closed phase will be highlighted and students will be able to see their grades, any published submissions and a conclusion if you added one.

This guide is adapted from the Workshop quick guide on moodle.org