Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences

The practical use and limitations

of current Moodle “Workshops”

The problem: … timely and efficient

feedback to students is not easy especially

in large classes…

In semester formative assessment

In semester individual assignments or group assignments

with individual components:

– Writing essays

– Portfolios

– Oral presentations

– Solving problems exercises

– Raising hypothesis exercises

– Analyse a publication

– Write a report

– ….

The bad news…

We (educators) are not the only ones being able to

provide formative feedback

There are more students than teachers in the

classroom…

…what if we provide them with the opportunity to

be the assessors?

An idea…

PEER ASSESSMENT

“Peer assessment is an arrangement for

learners to consider and specify the level,

value, or quality of a product or performance

of other equal status learners”. Topping,K.

2009

The good news

“Formative peer assessment is likely to involve

intelligent questioning, [ ]. In addition, peer

assessment can enable earlier error and

misconception identification and analysis, which

can lead to the identification of knowledge gaps

and engineering their closure”. Topping,K. 2009

So peer assessment (peer feedback):

– Saves your time

– Benefits the students

How to do that in Moodle?

Students allocation= the limitation

Manual if

groups

Limitation=

For each

student,

manual

allocation of all

the other

members of

the team as

reviewers AND

reviewees

Random if

no group,

just define the

# of students

each student

needs to

Peer assess

But then the grading is automatic…

Grading: Submission

Average mark

Robert the teacher ‘s mark can count

more than students’ mark and

ultimately he also has the power to

override the final mark in case of

discrepancies

Grading: Accuracy of peer assessment

Moodle calculates how

close the peer

assessment mark is to

the average mark

Average mark

Joe

Jane

Fair or harsh

you choose

Advice

All students can see all the comments and marks

given to them

So it is good to train students to provide

constructive and meaningful feedback

Ideas for you

That presentation gives you a practical resource that can be used if

you are interested in designing assignments that involve self and peer

assessment,

I generally have several occurrences of “workshop” activities involving

self and peer assessment during the semester and I mark the first one

(coefficient 16) for students to compare their mark to mine and then I

leave it to them for the next occurrences

The power of the team being able to judge the work of team members

for a team assignment is great, it is difficult to free load, and even if I

don’t mark them all I can still verify their contribution if needed.

Technical Limitations that you need to be

aware of

When students hit the submit button it is impossible to revert the

submission back to draft if students have had a problem or clicked

submit without joining their piece of work

The manual allocation takes time whereas you would expect that there

would be a functionality that allows allocation within a group

The feedback doesn’t allow the simultaneous use of rubrics and

comments like in normal assignments

THANK YOU FOR YOUR

ATTENTION

Ideas for you

problem solving exercises (5 occurrences/semester) : where

students have to study some resources and formulate a hypothesis to

solve a problem as their peer assessed assignment, all students can

therefore confront/judge and mark everyone’s hypotheses before the

discussion in a group session

Lit review and Class Book: each group of student is responsible for

writing a chapter so they have the opportunity to evaluate each other’s

summary of literature review and contribution to the chapter before

writing a coherent chapter for their group

Pharmacy group work: students needs to individually find information

about a medicine and then synthetise their individual work in a group

assignment