Workshop

The Workshop activity in Course Site allows for peer assessment. It is similar to an Assignment in that you can collect student work in electronic form, but has many more capabilities. Most notably, peer assessment groups can be created to allow review and feedback from fellow students and multiple submissions can be allowed. Feedback can be given external to the submitted work, using a rubric or defined criteria, or the file to be reviewed can be downloaded, for example if it's a Word file, opened up in Word, comments added with track changes and then uploaded back to the activity for the author. This entire process can be graded and each student can be assigned a grade for the work submitted and for the feedback given to fellow students.

A Brief Overview of the process:

1. A Workshop is added to the course like any other activity, turn editing on, identify the topic area, click on add an activity or resource, choose Workshop, then Add.
2. In order to see all of the options, click on Expand All. For information about a settings or option, click on the question mark in the circle by the feature or setting. The only required item on this page is the name. One of the noteworthy items for this activity is:
   1. Grading Settings - These choices define how the activity will be graded. Note that there are settings for grading strategy and the option to grade a student on both the submission and assessment portions of the activity.
3. After setting up and saving the activity, when you view the activity, you will be presented with a visual overview of the entire workshop process. Items of note:
   1. The active phase will be highlighted, in the example below, the workshop is still in the Setup phase.
   2. In general, you will manually need to move from phase to phase, by clicking on the switch phase (blue circle) icon located below the phase name. Be aware that if you set availability limits on submissions these will take effect even if a phase is active.
   3. If a step within a phase is not completely set up, a broken checkmark will appear. In this example, the Allocate Submissions step is not yet complete. Click on the step name to complete it. When a step is completed, the check mark will be solid green.
      
4. Your students also see a visual overview of the workshop process. Below is an example of what a student will see when the Workshop is in the Submission phase. Items of note:
   1. Current phase is highlighted.
   2. The instructions for submission that your student sees are the instructions that you provided in the Setup phase.
   3. The student receives a clear indication if no work has been submitted.
   4. The student clicks on Add submission when ready to submit the item.
      
5. Continue to manually move through the process. You can not begin to assign peer reviewers until the papers have been submitted, because by default, students can not review a paper until they have submitted one. You set up the parameters for peer review in the "allocate submissions" step, which becomes available when students submit papers. Items of note:
   1. In the example below, manual allocation was chosen.
   2. There are three possible ways to allocate peer review, manual, random, and scheduled.
   3. View this chart beginning in the middle column, which shows the student papers to be reviewed. For each  student paper, there is at least one reviewer, who is listed in the column to the left and at least one student paper to be reviewed, which is in the column to the right.
      
      
   4. Since this is manual allocation, you must go in and choose the reviewer and reviewee for each student listed in the middle column.
      
      
      
      
6. Here is an example of what your students will need to do when it's time to access a paper to review. In this case, students enter assessment criteria directly into the form fields. You may choose a different method:
   1. Click on the Assess button for the file, which is listed below under Assigned submissions to assess heading.
      
   2. Download the file.
   3. Open the file
   4. Enter your feedback based on the criteria designated by the instructor and overall feedback for the author.
7. Remember to manually move the process along. Assigning dates for automatic movement to the next phase is a possibility as well.
8. If this is a graded activity, you assign grades in the Grading evaluation phase and make any changes as needed. It is only when you move to the Closed phase, that your students will see the comments from the peer reviews and any grades. 
9. Students can see their final grade along with feedback and any uploaded files containing comments from the reviewer, by clicking on the link to the activity on the course page, scrolling down, and clicking on the title of their submission.
   

If you think this is something you may be interested in trying out in your course site, there is additional information on the Moodle website – Course Site is Lehigh's name for Moodle.  When you are ready to set up a Workshop peer-review activity and would like to discuss the process, please submit a ticket and someone will be in touch.

Visit this link to learn more about Workshop on the Moodle website.