Workshop – Peer Assessment Tool in Moodle

The Workshop activity in Moodle is a powerful tool which allows both self-assessment and peer assessment on an electronic submission of work. Students submit their work and receive two grades: one for their own work submitted and assessed by their peers and one for their own assessment of another student’s work.

Peer Assessment is an activity where students assess their peers’ assignments based on their teacher’s marking criteria. It allows students to reflect on both their own practice, and apply their own critique to their peer’s work both developing their reflective and evaluation skills (Nicol et al., 2014).

How does peer assessment work using the Workshop activity in Moodle?

There are five phases:

Setup
During this phase the teacher sets up the Workshop activity including the grading strategy, availability of phases and the assessment settings.

Submission
In the submission phase students submit their work electronically. The teacher can restrict the availability of the submission phase for a specific time frame by setting a submission start date and time and a submission end date.

Assessment
During the assessment phase, the students access and mark the electronic submissions allocated to them for the peer review. As with the submission phase, the teacher can restrict the time frame for the assessment phase.

Grading/Evaluation
This phase calculates the final grades for the submitted work and the assessments. The teacher can manually override calculated grades and provide the students with feedback on the work they submitted and the grading they did.

Closure/conclusion
This phase closes the peer assessment process, releases grades to the students and provides an opportunity for the teacher to summarise the process.

Further Support

If you would like to know more about the Workshop activity in Moodle or peer assessment more generally please contact asti@plymouth.ac.uk  We also have an online resource supporting users of the Workshop tool https://dle.plymouth.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=11049

References

Nicol, D., Thomson, A. and Breslin, C., 2014. Rethinking feedback practices in higher education: a peer review perspective. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 39(1), pp.102-122.