Join the dots

With ten sleeps left until the 2010 Australian Moodlemoot it may seem odd that I am posting a blog entry. The truth be known I’m only just starting to appreciate the phenomenal amount of work which needs to go into organising a physical (as distinct from virtual) conference for 450 people – but the good thing is that the presentations and workshop I’m delivering at the Moot have forced me to focus on doing some QA work on Moodle 2.0, as well as generally getting my head around some of the nuances of the changes in functionality.

Which brings me to the all-new and improved Workshop module, which for me is the biggest new feature from a pure teaching and learning perspective in 2.0. That’s not to say that things like the Repository API, better integration with ePortfolios, the controversial and yet long overdue introduction of Conditional Activities and the changes in navigation in Moodle aren’t all great – but none of them quite grab my imagination like the way the Workshop activity does.

Why? I think because it brings in a genuine peer review activity which allows students to review the work of others, and then to be assessed on their capability to assess the work of others – something that I think will be an absolute Godsend particularly in Higher Education where the ability to critique the work of others becomes more important. The Workshop also sneaks in a genuine rubric marking assessment type – remove the peer reviewing involvement in a Workshop activity and just make it teacher led and you have yourself a bona fide rubric driven assessment task.

Not to say that the Workshop is new. Its been around forever in Moodle, but unfortunately it was so unwieldly, unreliable, unsupported and just downright difficult to use that it has only been used in earnest by a handful of Moodle Holy Men (and Women) who actually understood how to use it and all its idiosyncracies for quite a while now. My advice to clients was to not touch it with a ten foot Moodle pole as it simply wasn’t up to a standard which I felt comfortable to associate my name with, thanks to its years of neglect. It was the classic underachiever – the student who you just knew could change the world if only they could get their act together and learn to relate to people a little better…

Moodle 2.0 however sees the introduction of a completely rebuilt Workshop activity, thanks largely to the work of David Mudrak, which has greatly improved the user interface, stability and functionality of the Workshop activity. I’m not going to step through the whole process of setting up a Workshop for a couple of reasons – firstly, its relatively self explanatory once you get into it, and secondly there are already videos out there by people like Gavin Henrick and Mary Cooch giving an overview. Thanks to these two I managed to get my head around most of the features quickly, but understanding how the grades are calculated took considerably more head scratching and some sagely guidance from David in the Moodle forums before I felt I could explain how it worked to someone else without needing to bluff my way through

Having finally got my head around how it all works, I thought I’d share it with the community – hopefully this will help those of you trying to understand how the grades in a Workshop are calculated and maybe inform some of the user documentation being written for the Workshop in the near future. In all its unpolished, raw glory, here’s the summary of how grades are calculated.

I must stress that this is not the full story – there are some more complexities in the way grades are calculated which I haven’t touched on, but as time goes on I might try and get my head around them and think of a way which they can be explained in non-mathematician terms. I’d love to hear feedback on whether the presentation above makes sense – for those coming to my Workshop at the Moot I’ll be going through the Workshop from beginning to end with participants acting as students – submitting work, peer reviewing and seeing their grades calculated.

Somewhat stressed, but getting excited as we get close to the Moot – look forward to seeing lots of you there!