Workshop quick guide

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. If you really want to make the most of everything a Workshop can do, make sure you study the full Workshop activity documentation.

Overview of the Workshop activity

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.
Clicking the question mark icon next to any setting you don't understand will display extra help.
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 page Workshop grading strategies gives more information.
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:

A workshop moves between different phases. You can automate some phases and (if needed) you can move back a phase. 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.
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) And do you want students to assess others' work even if they have not submitted anything themselves?
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. The page Using Workshop gives more details on how the grading works.
For the grade for assessment, you can decide how strict you want the comparison to be. If you are not sure, leave it as the default 'fair'.
You can recalcuate the grades several times.
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.

See a workshop in action

If you would like to practise with a workshop with students and data, log in to the Mount Orange School demonstration site and access the course Celebrating Cultures with the username teacher and password moodle. You can switch phases, check grading, publish submissions and explore other features of this useful activity.

Documentation