Hi,
I could not find out, what the scope of random allocation is, when grouping is on and groupings contain groups.
Will allocations will be done only within grouping or within all groups of the course?
thanks
Herbert
That's interesting question Herbert. I just checked the code and tried to set up a workshop that has "Grouping" selected. From what I can see, the selected grouping is ignored by the random allocator. It could probably be yet another checkbox at the allocation settings page - to pick users from selected grouping only.
Worse than that - I also realized there is actually a tiny bug in groupings support. Even if "Enable group members only" is checked in Site administration > Development > Experimental > Experimental settings, the Workshop currently ignores that "Available for group members only" setting and all course participants are considered as workshop participants (so for example, the number of expected submissions does not match the number of users in the grouping). However, the random allocator will pick only users from the selected grouping in this case. That is not correct I would say - though such bug has pretty low priority as the whole "Enable group members only" feature is very experimental.
The expected behaviour could IMHO be something like:
- If "Available for group members only" is enabled and a grouping is selected, then workshop participants (authors and reviewers) must be members of at least one group within the selected grouping.
- If "Available for group members only" is not enabled but a grouping is selected in the Workshop setting, then allocators should have an option to pick users from selected grouping only. However, some strong use case will be needed for this before this is implemented.
So, to answer your question: the current scope is that the random allocator will use all groups, regardless the grouping selected in the Workshop setting. If you have "Available for group members only" enabled, the allocator will use only groups from the grouping.
Thanks for spotting this. Please share your further ideas regarding the expected behaviour.
Workshop is a wonderful tool, but I can't use it yet. There are two group scenarios that I would like to be able to implement.
1. Allocation only to members of the same group (or grouping). I want students to evaluate their peers in their own class and not see work from the other class or cohort.
2. Allocations excluding members of the same group (within a grouping). This might provide a workaround for teacher allocation, which is outside the current scope of Workshop. Allocation is necessary in order to prevent confusion of the hundreds of students and dozens of tutors involved. I want each students' writing to be allocated to a selection of multiple tutors for feedback and grading. I imagine that allocating each group of students to receive feedback from N members of another (i.e. tutor) group, might achieve that.
It seems (from experiment) that Workshop does not respect 'groups' in either way.
It's not that bad Workshop at least supports the scenario 1: If the activity is in the Separate groups mode, the random allocator respects this and allocates within separate groups only.
Teacher allocation is not outside the current scope. Teachers (or those who have the permission to allocate submission to be more precise) can assign any submission to themselves by the "Assess" button. And the scenario with tutors (markers) was discussed recently - see http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=175908 Also note there is MDL-26633 on my todo list. That will basically lead to a new allocator subplugin (called "Mass allocation" probably) where you select set or reviewers and set of authors and the allocator will assign all selected submissions to all selected reviewers (with a weight pre-defined).
I know that you are working on fixing the teacher allocation process so that it is not so clumbsy. http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-26633 When do you for see having that done.