Peter Ruthven-Stuart

Hello Iain,

"I am interested in a form of online support for student peer review of individual contribution to a group task by other members of the group."

I think I am looking for a very similar ‘feature’.

I administer a course in which 250 students in groups of 3 (so 84 groups) create ‘compositions’ using the moodle Wiki module. A teacher gives grades and feedback for these compositions via the standard ‘Assignments-offline activity” module. Students in the same group get the same grade and feedback. The only exception to this is if students in a group report that one of their members did not make any contribution. If this is confirmed, the non-contributing student gets a zero.

Although students appreciate this collaborative work, there is some concern that ‘free-riders’ and minimally contributing students are being unfairly rewarded.

A possible solution to this problem is to allow groups members to evaluate each other’s contribution.

Certainly, there are ‘peer review’ modules already out there, and modules that could be used for peer review:

• The standard Workshop module (now significantly improved in version 2)
• The standard Database module
• The contributed Questionnaire or Feedback modules
• The contributed Peer review assignment type (and here)

The problem with these existing ‘peer review’ solutions is that they require the students to submit something. e.g. with the Workshop module, if students don’t upload / submit something, they can’t be evaluated, The same with the Database module solution. With the questionnaire and Feedback modules, the teacher has to list all of the students in the course, and then ‘trust’ the students to evaluate only those students who were in their group. Also, it is not possible for this evaluation of peers in a questionnaire or feedback activity (a grade) to be carried over to the gradebook.

Another issue with the existing solutions is that they are designed for evaluation of the quality of content. What I (and I think Iain) are after is something that will allow students to evaluate the level of contribution made to a group task by individual group members (i.e. quality of contribution).

At its simplest, students would be asked to evaluate the contribution of their group members (and perhaps themselves too) by checking one of the following or similar statements about each student:

• This student made no contribution
• This student made a minimal contribution (less than the other two)
• This students did as much as the other group members
• This student did more that the other group members

The wording and number of statements would be set up by the teacher, who would also assign a numerical value to each statement. For example, 0% for "no contribution", and 130% for "contributing more than the others". This grade could be used in one of two ways:

1. This “raw” grade could be recorded into the grade book and used to adjust another grade in the gradebook using a simple equation: e.g. if group X was given 60% for their composition, but student B was judged by her group members to have contributed more that the other group members, she would get an adjusted score of 78% (60 x 130%).
2. Alternatively, the calculation could be done within this ‘module’, so that students accessing this activity after the evaluation process would see their ‘average’ contribution score and the adjusted score of the group task.

So is there already a way to do this, either with standard or contributed modules?

Or, perhaps it might be possible to adjust an existing module; e.g. the “Peer review assignment type” could be changed to allow students to evaluate ‘offline’ activities, and so students would not be required to upload something before evaluating other students or being evaluated.

Or, is there a need for a new feature that will:

1. allow students to evaluate the level of contribution to group tasks by other group members
2. not require submission or uploading in order to evaluate or be evaluated
3. support the groups and groupings feature so that students will be automatically faced with only their group members to evaluate
4. report the ‘average’ (or perhaps max) contribution grade to the gradebook.
5. make it possible to give a grade to students who evaluate other students' contributions (i.e. an incentive for doing this evaluation task)

Any ideas or suggestions will be most welcome.

Hello,

In version 2 themes, the visibility of categories and courses on the top page can be controlled by clicking on the triangles to collapse or expand categories.

At the moment it seems that the default view is to have the top level categories expanded, and then everything beneath them collapsed. So only courses that exist immediately below the top category are visible. To view other courses, a user has to expand categories by clicking on the triangles.

For example in this site:

http://vle.c.fun.ac.jp/moodle/

the most recent categories (2011 and 2010 Courses) contain multiple sub-categories so no courses are visible. While some older categories further down the page that contain no sub-categories (e.g. Faculty Online Environments) so the courses within are visible.

Is there any way to set the default view (i.e. the view seen on accessing the top page) so that only certain categories are expanded (e.g. the most 'recent' category), and the rest are collapsed? This would make it easier for users to quickly navigate to their courses.

Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Hello Eloy,

Thank you very much for your quick response. Thanks to your help I have successfully upgraded moodle 1.9.10+ to 2.0.1+

I followed your suggestion 2, and dumped the mdl_log table. It was indeed a large table (700+ MB), almost half the size of the entire database.

I guess I need to learn more about the MySQL settings, in particular how to adjust 'timeout'. Though during the last 5 years of administering a moodle server I have never had this problem before, so perhaps it's just an issue for this particular upgrade and migration process.

Thanks again for your help.

Helen,

Thank you for reply.

I have reported this bug: MDL-26280

Let's hope there's a solution.

Colin,

Thank your for your quick reply and lin to the "Beginning Moodle 2.0 Administration" doc.

Things are looking a little pessimistic. In order to bring my colleagues on board with an upgrade to version 2, I am going to have make sure that they don't need to recreate courses from scratch. Given that importing 1.9 course into version 2 is (almost) a non-starter at the moment (here & here), I was hoping that upgrading would work. I wonder how many people have in fact successfully upgraded to version 2 from 1.9?

My moodle site is not all that big: 100+ courses, 1500+ users, MySQL database 1.5MB, moodledata 30 GB. Surely it must be possible? There are so many good things in version 2 that I'd like my colleagues to be able to use.

Finally, I should add that when I attempted the upgrade, it was with a fresh 2.0.1 download of the moodle directory, and when I ran the install I referenced the 1.9 moodledata directory and corresponding database. i.e. I did not attempt to install the the new moodle directory over the older one, so there were no non-standard mods or blocks in the moodle directory. However, because I was attempting to upgade the 1.9 MySQL database, there are tables for non-standard mods and blocks in the database. But, according to this doc, this should not be a problem. Apparently these tables will be left dormant until I install updated versions of the mods and blocks.