I love the flexibility of Moodle. It is powerful and can have complexity. Let me give you an example of why.

Gapfill

I’m a big fan of the excellent Gapfill plugin by Marcus Greene. I’ve found this plugin extremely useful in a variety of use cases.

A quick overview:

Essentially, the plugin allows you to add a question within a quiz that creates, well, a gapfill question. The teacher writes a question and surrounds the correct answers with brackets. Thus, the [correct] answer in this sentence would be “correct”. Then the teacher adds some distractors (notice that the correct answer is NOT included in the distractors).

The student is presented with the question text (with the “correct” answers represented by a box). The student can drag and drop from the possible answers. The correct answer and the distractors are always shuffled.

I then took this concept to a different use case. Since spelling is a place where we could free up teacher time, I created a question where the teacher creates 13 empty boxes. The teacher then types in the correct spelling word by adding the appropriate letter. Thus, the question looks like this:

[s][p][e][l][l][i][n][g][][][][[][]

The teacher records the word (in this case: spelling), uses it in a sentence, and maybe says the word again. (The blanks function to not give the number of letters in the word away.)

Then, the teacher adds every letter to the distractors.

a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,o,n,p,q,r,s,t,u,v,w,x,y,z

Here is an example that I’ve completed. Notice the recorded section that tells the students which word to spell. There are more boxes than the student would need. The distractors are all there, but not in any order. This adds complexity that doesn’t help me know what the student knows, just adds frustration.

The teacher could add capitals, but let’s not complicate this any further than I already have. 😉

Since this is to be used with elementary students, I don’t want the distractors shuffled. I want them in, well, alphabetical order.

I would want the “correct” answers (in this case, letters) to be selected from the “distractors”. I’m creating spots for answers that are intentionally left blank.

Note that I can also see some other use cases where I would want the distractors in a set order. When working with elementary students (and a wide variety of other students), it can be useful to provide a set structure.

Hard

This is why Moodle can be complex. A slightly different point of view (hey, I can create a great spelling experience that would free up teachers and let students be in control of their learning) can lead to a wide variety of complexity.

In my example, the answer is included (provided that I don’t add a space when typing), but how does the gapfill plugin know that? What happens if I don’t type exactly the same thing as the answer in the question and in the distractor? What happens if I forget to include the answer in the distractors?

Remember, the plugin was designed to add the distractors to the correct answer and shuffle those options. My use case if fundamentally different. I don’t want to provide just distractors, but all of the possible answers. While this is easy to understand as a teacher, it is more difficult to “explain” to a computer.

Marcus Greene

I huge shout out to Marcus Greene for even considering my request. I keep finding this willingness to collaborate and do what is best for students throughout the Moodle community. Mr. Greene is a terrific example of this community. I’ve never met Mr. Greene in the real world, but he is a hero of mine. His work has helped lots of kids learn.

You should also check out his WordSelect plugin. (And, yes, I use that one in a way that he didn’t intend too. See the part about identifying topic sentences, which is NOT a word.)

I love the flexibility in Moodle. Usually, I can find a way to provide an experience for learners that meets our needs. Sometimes, these could be improved visually, but, usually, I can find a way.

Except.

I’m still not finding a way for students to do self-assessment cleanly. The idea here is that self-assessment is a powerful activity. Having students self-assess is just good pedagogy. Being able to do this through Moodle would be fantastic.

I have tried a variety of methods.

Quiz

Ultimately, this is the winner so far. The teacher creates a quiz with the rubric as the questions. This allows for a grade to be derived. The student can easily see his grade and his assessment. However, this certainly doesn’t look or feel like a rubric. This can also be visually quite lengthy.

Assignment

This is my second-place finisher. I can get incredibly close with Assignment. The only caveat is that students can not be in any groups. Here is the process:

Course must be set to “Separate Groups”

This is where the caveat of students can only be in one group comes in. If students are in multiple groups (e.g. they are in a first-hour group, and a self-assessment group), they will see the results of everyone in all of those groups. Thus, students would be able to see all of first hour. To combat this, one could make a class just for self-assessment.

Create an Assignment.

• Give it a name.
• Uncheck all Submission types
• Uncheck all Feedback types
• Set grading to Rubric

Locally assigned roles

Adjust the Locally assigned roles for this assignment only. Make each student a Non-editing teacher.

Adjust permissions

Make sure that students can NOT “Access all groups”

Questionnaire

Again, close with this one, but two issues come up:

• No “score”
• Groups remain an issue: students can only be in one group.

Database

This can be pretty. It is easy to limit to one student. However, no total score is generated.

Workshop

Workshop is geared for peer assessment. However, it is geared for the whole class. Part of the Workshop system is that the entire class moves from one phase to the next. There are five phases:

1. Setup
2. Submission
3. Assessment
4. Grading evaluation
5. Closed

The entire class moves from one phase to the next. Additionally, you can restrict the activity by Group. However, this means that you would need to create the Workshop Activity, with all the settings and then Duplicate the activity times the number of students. So, if you had 98 students, you would need to Duplicate the activity 97 times. Additionally, you would need to reset the Group on all 97 of those duplicates. (Now you can automatically switch from the Submission to Assessment phase – which saves a ton of steps).

So, that’s a quick overview of our goal of having students self-assess. There doesn’t appear to be a simple way to make this happen.