I was asked by a teacher if Moodle would allow students to grade other students presentations. That is, the teacher has assigned students to give a classroom presentations. This teacher wanted the students in the class to grade the presentations in a simple, easy way.

I’ve previously written up how a teacher can grade oral presentations in Moodle quickly and efficiently. I thought that was absolutely brilliant. This teacher is asking for something similar, but, yet, very different. Instead of just the teacher doing the grading, every student would provide feedback.

I believe that this is good pedagogy. Having students involved in the assessment of their work is important. By assessing the work of their peers, each student also gets a good opportunity to deal with the criteria and learn the expectations.

So, how to do this in Moodle? Well, this seems like a great opportunity for the Workshop Module. The Workshop Module is designed to be student assessment based. In its most popular use case, the Workshop Module is peer editing.

Now, let’s take a look back at what I was asked. Each student will get up in front of the class and present on a topic. The teacher has already developed and shared a rubric with the class. The teacher would like each student to complete a rubric for each presentation.

Although the Workshop Module is not specifically designed for this, it will do a wonderful job. The students will need to “submit” their presentation prior to the starting of the delivery of those presentations. (Workshop module must have all the students at the same point in the process). Thus, I would have the students enter the title of their presentation and a short synopsis (a slightly tricky way to get them to write more and practice writing). Then, the other students will have a rubric and can provide feedback.

First of all, each student will receive feedback from many students. This will give them a good overall picture of how the presentation went. The students will also receive a grade for how closely they graded to the rest of the class. So the students who are listening to the presentation will also receive a grade for how they graded that presentation.

The teacher will get a wealth of data. Knowing how each student graded the presentation (and this is presented in a simple view) can give the teacher a nice broad overview of the class.

The teacher can then grade the same presentation and release this back to the students.

I’m working on a full write up to post over on Master Moodle. If you are interested in how to do this, please let me know.