Moodle 2.0

Adding Social Activities to Your Course
Timing of submissions and assessments
Workshops allow you to set different due dates for submitting work, and for
assessing other student's work. If you set both due dates the same, so many students
might submit their work just before the submission deadline that they cannot all be
assessed before the assessment deadline. Consider setting the submission deadline
well before the assessment deadline. Then, before opening up the assessment ability
to the students, examine the work submitted and ensure that it's close to what you
expected or were trying to elicit from the students. You might even want to use
the time between submission and assessment to refine your assessment criteria, in
response to the work submitted.
The four questions
The fields in the workshop window give you many choices. No matter what you enter
into each field, your many decisions can be summed up as:
• What will you have each student do? Create a file offline and upload it to
the workshop? Write a journal entry? Participate in an online chat? Perform
some offline activity and report on it via email or Wiki? Although the
workshop window allows the student to upload a file, you can also require
any other activity from the student.
• Who will assess the assignments? Will the Teacher assess all assignments?
Will students be required to assess other students' assignments? Will each
student self-assess their work?
• How will the assignments be assessed? You can determine the number of
criteria upon which each assignment is assessed, the grading scale, and the
type of grading.
• When will students be allowed to submit their assignments and assessment?
The assignment becomes available as soon as you show it. However, you can
require students to assess an example before being allowed to submit their
own work, and you can also set a deadline for submitting assignments.
All of the fields that we cover in the following subsections are variations on these
questions. The online help does a good job of explaining how to use each field.
Instead of repeating how to use each field here, we will focus on how your choices
affect the student and Teacher experience.
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