Fostering Engagement with Moodle Workshop
Nurturing meaningful student engagement in online courses is as critical as it is challenging. One tool Dr. Mark DeWitt has added to his toolbox to facilitate that engagement is the Moodle Workshop activity.
Moodle’s documentation describes Workshop as a “powerful peer assessment activity.” Although DeWitt had misgivings about peer-to-peer assessment, his interest was piqued when he learned about the tool’s multiple deadline functionality.
In his online Cajun and zydeco music history course, Dr. DeWitt previously tried to introduce a study group activity in Moodle’s discussion forum by splitting students into groups, and assigning each member a study question to answer with other members of the group providing feedback on those answers.
“With peer review, I was trying to solve this problem of how to create an assignment where students were interacting with each other in a fairly real way,” DeWitt says.
But he needed two deadlines — one for the students to respond to their study question, and another for the group reviews. Without the second deadline, some students would post early and not have anybody to respond to, while other students would wait until the last minute to post, leaving no time for meaningful conversation.
Moodle Workshop not only allowed him to set multiple deadlines, but also allowed him to set how much each component of the activity — answer submission, feedback, and instructor assessment — should count toward each student’s whole grade.
“I thought it worked fairly well for what it was designed for,” Dr. DeWitt says. “I’m still chasing my vision of some kind of assignment where students interact in a more organic way; I don’t think it achieved that.
“But it was pretty well designed to give students a fair shake both in grading their own work and the grading of their grading,” he says. “I’m pleased with how it all turned out from that standpoint.”
Instructional Designer Angie Lee says the Workshop tool can be tricky for those who haven’t worked through the process before. The tool has five phases instructors must set up and then transition through: Set up, Submission, Assessment, Grading/evaluation, and Close.
Although the activity concludes at the Grading/evaluation stage, no one will see their grades until the activity is closed by the instructor.
Instructors establish rubrics for the original student submission and the peer feedback that follow, which can encourage better engagement by setting clear standards within the assignment.
“The rubric and grading system provide accountability for responses so it’s not just a ‘well done,’ or ‘good job,’ which hopefully provides for a better peer review,” says Lee.
For more information about using Moodle Workshop in your course, request a consultation or call our Instructional Support line at 337-482-1246.
Dr. Mark DeWitt has been with the University of Louisiana at Lafayette School of Music & Performing Arts since 2010 and holds the Dr. Tommy Comeaux Endowed Chair in Traditional Music. He began teaching online in 2014.