Peer Assessments Using the Moodle Workshop Tool John F. Dooley Knox College Department of Computer Science Galesburg, IL 61401 USA
[email protected] ABSTRACT In this Tip, we describe our experiences over the past four years in using the Workshop tool in the Moodle Learning Management System (LMS) to allow students to do peer assessments of student written journal article reviews. In our junior-level Software Development course, students are required to read and review several journal articles, producing a written review of 2-4 pages. Students are then required to use the Workshop tool to read and assess the work of several of their peers using an instructorsupplied rubric. In this Tip we describe the Workshop tool, how it is set up for student use, and the results of several experiences with this approach.
Categories and Subject Descriptors D.2.2 [Design Tools And Techniques]: Object-Oriented Design Methods, Structured Programming, Top-Down Programming, User Interfaces, K.3 [Computers and Education], K.3.1 [Computer Uses in Education]: Collaborative learning, K.3.2 [Computer and Information Science Education]: Computer science education, self-assessment.
General Terms Measurement, Design.
Keywords Software development, Computer science education, Peer review, Assessment.
1.
INTRODUCTION
As one of our goals for the Computer Science major at Knox, the faculty decided that reading in the computer science literature is a critical skill for our graduates. One way in which we develop this skill in our students is by having them read published articles and write critical reviews of the articles, focusing on content, writing style, and attempting to place the article in the context of the course they are taking. Traditionally, the students have written 2 – 5 page reviews that were graded by the instructor. Recently in our junior-level Software Development course, we have experimented with having the students assess their colleagues reviews using an instructor-supplied rubric. Our reasons for this are three-fold. First, once our students graduate and go to graduate school or to work in industry, they will continually have their own work reviewed by their peers as a normal part of their job function, so they need to get used to having others critique their work products. Secondly, they will be
doing the same types of assessments of their peers so they should learn how to do a fair, tactful, but critical assessment of a peers work. Finally, by having to assess their peers article reviews, they are exposed to more journal articles than the course requires.
2.
THE WORKSHOP TOOL
The Moodle LMS (http://moodle.org) is a free and open-source software system based on the social constructionist model of pedagogy. Moodle supports the addition of plug-ins that allow third-party developers to add new functionality to the base Moodle system. The Workshop tool is a standard plug-in that comes with the base Moodle system. Workshop allows for instructors to create and manage workshops, set up their own grading rubric, decide on a grading strategy (five different strategies are supported), set separate submission and assessment deadlines, and change many other options related to how the students view and assess their peers' work.
3.
THE SETUP
Setting up the Moodle Workshop activity is one of the more complicated in the system. The instructor has approximately 20 different options to set to configure the workshop behavior. The most detailed part of the setup is deciding on a grading strategy and creating scoring guides. These will be demonstrated at the presentation.
4.
RESULTS
Over the last four years approximately forty (40) students have completed the Workshop assignment in the Software Development class. Their reactions to the assignment range from enthusiasm and interest in viewing their peers work – something they normally are not permitted to do – to outright horror at having to assess their friends' work. Generally impressions of the assignment have been positive and assessments on a second Workshop (introduced two years ago) have improved over the first. While this technique is not groundbreaking, it does contain some novel elements that may help provide a good Software Development experience.
5.
REFERENCES [1] The Moodle Workshop Module Documentation is at http://docs.moodle.org/en/Workshops (retrieved on 23 March 2009).
