 With thoughtful planning and clear explanation to participants, Moodle's workshop activity can provide a very powerful peer assessment tool. Participants may assess each other anonymously, they can practice with examples to review, they may have a chance to evaluate their own work and the peer reviews can be random or teacher-defined. In case of any conflicts, the teacher can retain overall control. In this workshop activity, taken from the Learn Moodle Basics MOOC, participants must submit information about their home region and then evaluate the submissions of other participants, according to set criteria. You can see that the workshop has four different phases and then it is closed. Let's explore these one at a time, from the teacher and student point of view. Setup phase, teacher view. Our teacher adds a workshop to his course, by turning on the editing, clicking Add an activity or resource and selecting workshop. He then gives it a name and description which can be displayed on the course page by ticking the box. Other settings can be expanded by clicking their links. Grading settings. Here you can decide how you want the submissions to be graded. There are four standard methods and clicking the help icon gives more information. We'll use the simple number of errors which is good for a basic workshop. Note workshops have two grades, the grade students get from submitting and the grade they get for the quality of their assessment and as a teacher you can change the ratio here and also set pass grades. Submission settings. Here is where teachers add the instructions and decide how many, if any, files may be uploaded and the types and size of these files. You can also decide to allow submissions after the deadline if this is important to you. Assessment settings. Give basic instructions for the peer assessment here. Tick the box if you want students to have a chance to assess their own work. This is not a certainty, it just means their submissions will be included during allocation. Feedback. Teachers can choose to add an overall conclusion and or file attachments at the end of the workshop activity. Example submissions can be useful, especially if your students are new to a workshop and need practice assessing. You can add examples of good and less good work for students to review and decide how and when you want these example submissions to appear. Availability allows you to set opening and closing times for the submissions and assessments. You can also choose to start the assessment phase, that is the time when students are peer reviewing, automatically at the end of the submission phase. We'll look into that shortly. Other settings are similar to other Moodle activities, but it's worth knowing that in activity completion students need to have only one of the two grades to complete the activity. Clicking save and display shows two items are done, but there are still two tasks remaining. One is to edit the assessment form. This workshop is using a simple number of errors, so we can write a short phrase explaining what the student must look for and choose our word for wrong or correct. Some items can have more weight than others, if desired. While the teacher is preparing the workshop, here's what our student sees. She can't access the workshop until the teacher switches to the next phase, so make sure as a teacher you remember to do this. Submission phase, teacher view. When our teacher switches to the submission phase, students will then be able to submit their work. We check the green arrows to ensure all our tasks are done and see that we must allocate the submissions to the assessors. We'll do this shortly. Submission phase, student view. Now is the time for students to submit work. In our workshop, based on the Learn Moodle Basics MOOC, they must write three sentences about their home area, add a link to a relevant website, and upload an image. And then wait until the next phase is available. Assessment phase, teacher view. During the assessment phase, students will review each other's submissions, but before they can do this, our teacher must decide how the submissions will be allocated. Manual allocation means we decide who assesses whose submission, which is fine if it's a small class or you know your students well and want to control certain allocations. We can use the dropdowns to choose the reviewers and reviewees. Random allocation is useful if you have large classes or don't want to be personally involved in the selections. You can choose either a number per submission or a number per reviewer. We can also allow students to assess without having submitted anything. As only one grade is required for activity completion, this at least would allow them to complete the activity. Scheduled allocation means that as soon as the deadline for submissions has passed, the workshop will send out the submissions to be assessed. Again, there are settings to choose from for the submission allocations. Now it's time to move to the assessment phase and this is where the peer assessment becomes really valuable because the students are doing the work and our teacher can simply monitor the process. Assessment phase, student view. Note, if you want to make assessing or reviewing anonymous, read the workshop FAQ for instructions on which permissions to change to do this. With the assessment phase open, our student clicks into the workshop and must then scroll down and click to open and view her allocated submissions. Now she sees the assessment form set up by the teacher before. Note, it is essential the assessment criteria are easy to understand and unambiguous. Much of the success of the workshop activity depends on students' understanding of the peer assessment criteria and their ability to correctly implement them. This grading strategy is number of errors. Moodle's documentation on workshop gives information about the other methods. Grading evaluation phase, teacher view. Here's where teachers check the grades. The assessment grade is calculated by comparison with the best assessment, which means the grade for assessment is determined by comparing the grade a student gave for each submission with the grade other participants gave. If everyone agrees and gives exactly the same grades, then everyone gets an assessment grade of 100%. If not everyone agrees, the amount that they disagree is reflected in a lower grade for the assessment. And this comparison can range from very strict to very lax. If you're not sure, leave it as the default, fair. Here too, after the calculation, is where our teacher is able to edit any grades if needed. Perhaps one student was over-generous or too unkind. The overridden grades appear in a different colour. During this phase also, we can publish, that's make visible, selected submissions at the end of the workshop. These could be good examples or poor examples, but are useful for students to peruse. And submissions can be published by clicking into them and ticking the publish submission box. Grading evaluation phase, student view. During this time, which can be a few minutes or a few days, depending on our teacher's workload and the number of students, students are prompted to be patient and come back later. Close, teacher view. When the workshop is closed, the two grades will appear in the grade book. And if activity completion is used, the activity will be marked complete. Close, student view. Here, our student can see any conclusion that was added, she can check how others assessed her, and she can view any published submissions. To summarise, workshop is an advanced peer review activity which empowers learners.