Moodle in English: Moodle Workshop Case Study

Improving the quality of assessment and feedback mechanisms is of key interest to the University of Bath. Therefore, as part of my remit as a Learning Technologist, I've recently been examining use of the Moodle Workshop activity as a means for both self and peer-assessment.

With contributions from my colleagues in the e-Learning team, I've put together a Moodle Workshop-focused case study which I'd like to make available to the wider Moodle community. It can be downloaded from:
http://people.bath.ac.uk/ma0np/20061218MoodleWorkshopCaseStudy.pdf

Please do feel free to get in touch with me, either on or off list, should anyone wish to discuss any part of it further

Happy reading, and of course, Merry Christmas!

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Re: Moodle Workshop Case Study

by Art Lader - Monday, 18 December 2006, 9:27 PM

Dear Nitin,

Great job! I have added this post to the case studies page at Moodle Docs - http://docs.moodle.org/en/Case_studies

Hope you don't mind.

Regards,
Art

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Re: Moodle Workshop Case Study

by Nitin Parmar - Monday, 18 December 2006, 10:45 PM

Dear Art,

That's not a problem at all

Nitin

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Re: Moodle Workshop Case Study

by John Isner - Monday, 18 December 2006, 10:39 PM

I read your case study with interest, as Workshop is my favorite Moodle activity. I have a few comments.

(1) An important factor seems to be missing in your "alternative approach": teacher assessment. Teacher assessment is essential to a workshop. Students are graded on the QUALITY of their assessments, where quality is a function of the difference between the teacher's assessment and the student's assessment. The teacher's assessment is the normative force that draws participants toward a consensus.

(2) I do not see how students can begin work without having at least seen the assessment elements. The purpose of the "assess one or more examples provided by the teacher" phase of Workshop (which you omit) is to familiarize students with the assessment elements by having them make one or more practice assessments BEFORE they begin their own work. It's like calibrating a laboratory instrument before you start making measurements.

There is no place for subjectivity in a Workshop (it's at the opposite end of the spectrum from Blog). Workshop is the best tool in Moodle for helping students develop a critical eye toward their own and others' work.

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Re: Moodle Workshop Case Study

by Nitin Parmar - Monday, 18 December 2006, 10:56 PM

Dear John,

Many thanks for taking the time to review my case study. Something I omitted to mention in my earlier post that my case study is still very much a work in progress and comments, therefore, are very welcome.

Teacher assessment, I would say, is preferable to a workshop rather than essential. Whilst it would be desirable to have teacher input into a workshop, I would counter with the view that it is not always possible for a teacher to do this. A teacher may take a view that they would like to use the workshop as more of a peer assessment activity, with little or no teacher contribution(s).

In writing the case study, I attempted to give an overview of some of the features that the workshop activity provides rather than give any specifics or any prescribed advice. Therefore, I have left the option of allowing the student to complete a practice assessment up to the teacher. In saying this, I do agree in part with your sentiments.

Many thanks once again for your comments.

Best Regards,

Nitin

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Re: Moodle Workshop Case Study

by Joseph Thibault - Thursday, 4 October 2007, 2:25 AM

Does anyone have access to a video of the process of creating and using a Workshop, I always learn better by seeing and hearing... (and I wasn't able to find a Workshop example built into the Demo.moodle.org course.

Thanks,

Joe

Joseph Thibault
GlobalClassroom

blog: http://theglobalclassroom.blogspot.com

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Re: Moodle Workshop Case Study

by John Isner - Thursday, 4 October 2007, 3:36 AM

Not a video, but would you be satisfied by a series of annotated screenshots? If so, try this page from the Finnish Teacher's Manual (it is for the version of Workshop in Moodle 1.5.4).

Workshop, although a "Standard" module, is effectively unsupported at the moment, so use it at your own risk. There was supposed to be a new version in September which combined the functionality of Workshop and Exercise, but the deadline has obviously slipped (by how much, no one knows). In anticipation of the new version, bug fixing in the current version was put on hold. The bugs in the current version are serious enough to make Workshop unusable. It's too bad, since Workshop is the one of the best activities in Moodle.

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Re: Moodle Workshop Case Study

by Joseph Thibault - Thursday, 4 October 2007, 4:46 AM

Jon, all great information. Thanks for the update and the information about the walk though. We (and our teachers) love Moodle, the hardest part is always training.

-Joe

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Re: Moodle Workshop Case Study

by John Isner - Thursday, 4 October 2007, 4:58 AM

I also do some teacher training. I'm getting ready for a class next Tuesday. My favorite part of the session is Workshop, and it's the main reason I haven't upgraded my training site beyond 1.6.3.

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Re: Moodle Workshop Case Study

by Joe Rowe - Thursday, 4 October 2007, 2:29 PM

I've never really found the workshop tool useable enough to work with my students aged 13 to 18. It is just too perplexing from the UI standpoint even when there are no bugs. Kids get too stressed out even when they turn in very high quality work. And when the frequent bugs come up, I waste a ton of time at my computer as the teacher.

I have a video capture setup. I have an AVER media box that captures the VGA signal and sends it to an RCA cable of video output. I then use a rare box i got on ebay that converts the video composite into firewire. So I use computer 2 ( a mac ) to capture the live screen from computer 1. I just export the file as tutorial.mov

I will capture a video of me creating a workshop. my moodle is version 1.5.3

This will also help document many of the workshop bugs.

I also found that I could not backup and restore my course when I used a workshop. I had to delete that resource. I also had to delete my glossary. But that was long ago and I don't think i can reproduce that bug quicly.

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Re: Moodle Workshop Case Study

by John Holmes - Wednesday, 26 August 2009, 10:37 AM

Joe,
Did you ever create the tutorial.mov file?
I'd love to watch how the workshop is setup.
I also find it quite confusing as a newbie to this plugin.

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