 Hello everyone, thank you for joining us. Welcome to the Moodle Academy webinar, Student Partnership in Assessment. I am Sandra Mats, Moodle Academy education relevance coordinator here at Moodle HQ, and I'm joined by my colleague Anna Krasa, Education Advisor from the Moodle Academy team, who will help facilitate the webinar. Today, I would like to welcome our invited speaker, Rob Lombdi, Senior Learning Technologist at Dublin City University. Rob will share the experiences of Dublin City University in utilizing core and third-party Moodle tools to support assessment partnership and encourage other educators to adopt these approaches into their own practice. So, over to you, Rob. Thank you. Thank you very much, Sandra, and I'm just going to share my screen and we will get going. Thanks so much, everybody. Thanks for that lovely introduction. Thanks to all of you for coming along here today to listen to this webinar for anyone listening back on the recording. Thank you for taking the time to come in and look at the recording as well. It's a pleasure to be here and share some of the experiences from my university of utilizing various Moodle tools to support student partnership in assessment. So, many thanks to Moodle Academy for this opportunity and many thanks indeed for all the great work that Moodle Academy does in supporting Moodle educators around the world. So, in this session, I'll present some slides and share a bit of the experience. But I do want it to be very much an interactive session and I will invite you to respond anonymously to some polls throughout the session to get your opinions on things. And please throughout the session, please do use the chat to put in comments and questions. And I'll stop at various points throughout the session to address the comments and the questions in the chat. Just to give you a bit of background about where I'm coming from, as Sandra said, I work in Dublin City University or DCU in Ireland. We're a relatively young university, about 40 years old and situated in the capital city of Dublin. We have about 20,000 students and about 2,000 staff members and we offer a wide range of degree programs across disciplines like humanities, engineering, computing, science and health, business and education. We focus a lot on professional programs. We have very deep links with industry and give our students lots of opportunities to practice and develop real world skills and so on. And we have a very diverse student body as well. We have, since our inception as a university, supported students from various socioeconomic backgrounds to attend higher education. We support lifelong learners. We are Ireland's first University of Sanctuary providing university places to refugees and others. So because of that, I think we are a very open, a very inclusive university and that spurs a lot of the work that we do around student partnership in teaching, learning and assessment. I myself work in the university's Centre for Teaching and Learning called the Teaching Enhancement Unit where we work with our academic staff to help them develop their teaching practice. We engage a lot in educational research and with various different communities of practice and networks and so on. And interestingly, our Centre for Teaching and Learning has two roles, one is kind of traditional academic development and the other role is very much leading our institutional learning technologies and we don't really see a divide between academic development and learning technology. All of it is in service of good learning for students. We are Moodle users for over 20 years now. In fact, exactly 20 years ago in February 2004, our university published a position paper committing to an open source of virtual learning environment being Moodle. And ever since then in those intervening 20 years we have been very, very strong advocates of Moodle and very, very deep users of Moodle and long may it continue for another 20 years at least. So as Sandra outlined really today I'm going to share a little bit of the experience of our academic staff in DCU and how they have been practising partnership approaches in assessment with their students and if that term partnership is a bit new to you or a bit confusing to you, hopefully I'll be able to dispel some of that confusion throughout this webinar session. And in particular obviously I'll focus a little bit on how Moodle plugins have been used by our staff to support some of these partnership approaches. So this webinar I hope will be of interest to those of you who are directly involved in teaching and assessing students, particularly those in higher education as that's my background, but obviously regardless of what sector of education you are based in, hopefully some of these stories from our lecturers will be of use to you. Those of you who are maybe perhaps quite adept at using Moodle, some of this might seem very old hat to you. For those of you maybe who are a bit more novice or on a Moodle learning curve, there might be some ideas in here that you can take back and work with your own students. But I'm also looking forward to learning from you in this webinar as well and in the chat and various points throughout. I'd love to hear your feedback on what our lecturers have been doing and I'd love you to share your experiences as well of using Moodle to engage and interact with your students and perhaps our combined experiences with all go away learning something new here today. That's enough for me for the moment. I want to give you folks an opportunity to contribute. So I'm going to invite you now to respond to an anonymous poll using a tool called VBOX. So in the chat here in Zoom, I'm just going to paste a link. And if you would all just take a moment to click that link, it will open up a web page on your own browser on your device and you'll be presented with a welcome screen. And then in a moment, I'll start by presenting you with a poll to respond to. So I'll just give you a moment to click that link. And there we go. I think most of you have managed to click the link. So I'm now going to ask you a very simple question or what I hope is a simple question anyway, which is just very simply, how are you today? So if you want to take a moment to respond to that question on your own device, I think you can enter in a word or maybe two or three brief words. How are you feeling today? I won't spend too long on this. I might just give you another few seconds to respond to that. Okay, I think most of you responded to that. Thanks very much. Let's see how is everyone? People are good. People are grand, grand thanks. Excellent. A wee bit tired. The Irishness is coming out in you all. So that's wonderful to see. Oh, it's sunny in Rhea. Please send some sunshine over to Dublin because it is very, very cold in Dublin at the moment. So we could do with some of your sunshine, please. Everyone seems to be good and in good spirits. So that's good. That's always great at the start of a webinar to have people in good spirits. Another question for you now. So again, if you just look at your own devices now, this one might require you to think another little bit. So I'll give you a moment to have a think on this question. And this question is basically, I'm just asking you to tell me what springs to mind when you hear terms like student involvement, student engagement, student partnership, student co-creation. Some of these words often float around in education discourse lately. And people can have different interpretations of them, different connotations of what they mean. And I'd really love to get a bit of an insight from you here today as to what you think some of these words mean. And if you have never heard of these words before, that is perfectly fine. Please let me know that in your response. You can say, Rob, I've never heard of any of these terms. Or if you do want to venture some sort of a guess as to what they mean, please do take a moment to do that. For anyone who's just joined us as well, I'll just paste the link again in the chat. If any of you want to take a moment to click on that VVox link in the chat to open up the poll. So just over half of us have responded. I'll give people another moment or so just to respond to this. And again, there's no need for an academic essay in response to this question. One or two keywords on what you think when you hear some of these terms would be perfectly fine. So quite a few responses there. I might close this off now in a few seconds, folks. So last few seconds now for those of you to try getting with your responses. Okay, thanks very much. I think most of us managed to respond there. So let's take a look at some of the responses. Some people are not sure maybe it has to do with developing a certain area. Yeah, very possibly. Yeah, working towards something, working with students to develop something. Collaboration, empowerment, engaging in the learning journey. I love that. I love collaboration. Absolutely, that's at the heart of partnership working together. Empowerment, I love that word. Absolutely empowering our students to take ownership of their learning and their assessment. Peer assessment, yeah. Great, we're gonna top a peer assessment in a little while. That's definitely a form of student partnership in assessment. Active participation. There's that empowerment, collaboration again. Lovely. Figuring out how to meet students where they are, finding the middle ground for a conversational learning experience. I love that. I love that take. Absolutely. I think getting to know our students and having our students get to know us and having ongoing dialogue about where they're at and where they're learning and how they're learning and what's working for them and how we can improve is so important. And it's at the heart of education really that relationship between teacher and learner. Genuine dialogue, excellent. A wiki forum database, all fantastic tools for engaging with students. Absolutely. Soap bubble's pretty, but often empty. Yeah, absolutely. I think as with so many things in education at the moment, there can be an element of performativity to it where people are trying to do things to be seen to do it, but does it actually have any impact? Is it actually achieving or is it bettering any outcomes? Always really important to ask ourselves that, are we actually making a difference by trying new approaches and trying new things? Excellent autonomy. Students helping each other, student participation. Active, lovely. Okay, some wonderful words and terms coming in here from people. I think all sitting within that same bucket of working with students, collaborating, helping, empowering them, all ultimately, I think what everyone is getting at here is really leading towards better learning outcomes for our students, which as educators, I imagine is what we're all interested in and what gets us up out of bed in the morning. So thanks very much for that, folks. I will ask another one or two V-Box questions a little later on so you can leave that V-Box link open on your computer and I'll come back to that in a moment. So here in Ireland, we're very lucky that we have a national program which kind of offers us some guidance and advice around how to engage students in their education. And this idea of working with students, getting students involved in education might seem quite new, but actually, I suppose a lot of its roots or a lot of its contemporary roots stretch back to say the 1960s, for example, in a Western European context when student movements became very, very visible and kind of were sort of advocating and protesting and fighting for rights at their education institutions. So many of us might be familiar with things like students unions and student councils and students sitting on university committees and students participating in governing authorities and the governance of an institution, et cetera. Those are forms of student engagement, at least or those are domains of student engagement. But increasingly in recent times, another domain of student engagement has been kind of teaching, learning and assessment. So involving students in things like curriculum review, program review, module, co-creation, module design, module review, and indeed one area that I'm very interested in is involving students in their own assessment. So student engagement and having students more involved and having students participate in decisions can take many, many forms in our educational institutions, including in teaching, learning and assessment. And in fact, many of us might not even realize if we might already be engaging students quite a lot in teaching, learning and assessment. We might be involving them unbeknownst to ourselves in various decisions around their assessment and various decisions around their learning, but perhaps we've never thought of it that way. And there can often be, although a lot of these terms are very interchangeable, student involvement, student engagement, student partnership, there can often be some nuances between them. Sometimes for example, student engagement can be seen to be, well, students may be voicing their opinion, giving their feedback, sharing their thoughts, et cetera, but those thoughts and feedback and voices might not actually translate into any kind of impact or change. Whereas student partnership is something that's a bit more deeper and a bit more active and it's really where students are actually involved in decision making and are actually impacting change to some degree or other, because I think it's also important to note that in any kind of a student partnership, there is absolutely still a role for the teacher, the teacher is still the subject expert, the teacher is still the facilitator of learning, the teacher still has responsibilities for learning and for assessment and for standing over marks and standards and so on. So as I was saying, student partnership is really about, and it goes back to what someone responded in that poll earlier, it's about finding ways for that middle ground where we can engage with students and invite them in to make decisions around or to contribute to decisions around their teaching, learning and assessment. And why am I interested particularly in assessment out of all the things that students can be involved in and contribute towards? Why am I interested in the area of assessment? I suppose because we know, we've known for quite a long time, assessment is a very important activity in education, assessment is often considered to drive learning, it can be very high stakes, there can be a lot of emotion involved for students and for staff, there can be a lot of consequences and a lot of outcomes hinge on assessment. So it's really, really important. And I think if we can find ways to invite students in to maybe shape their assessment to help them get better outcomes in assessment, it's a win-win situation for both educators and students. So that's why the assessment arena is of particular importance to me. And I suppose a lot of our work in DCU around this area of student partnership and assessment actually arose out of some work we had been doing around academic integrity. So we're also very interested in finding ways that our staff can design assessment so that students are encouraged to adhere to good academic standards and to avoid academic misconduct and to approach their assessments with integrity. And one of the ways in which we've discovered that academic integrity can be fostered is by involving students in their assessment by giving them a sense of ownership, a sense of agency in their assessment, they're less likely to engage in academic misconduct because they feel like they have more of a stake, more of a say, more of a voice in their assessment. So they're less likely to cheat or to plagiarize as a result. And we were very interested kind of coming out of this angle of academic integrity. But what does this mean in practice? What does it mean to have students involved in their assessment? What does that look like to, you know, have students as a partner in their assessment and what are the tools that we can use to facilitate that? And that's really what prompted our journey in this whole area. And over the past three years or so, we've been working together to build some practices around student partnership and assessment in DCU, working very closely with our students' union, of course. We can't engage in a student partnership project without working with some students. It would be unthetical to do otherwise. We really wanted to ensure our work was based on evidence. So we surveyed the literature to help us discover what some assessment partnership practices were. We've put together some guidance for students for staff and students around how to work together in assessment partnership. We've been piloting and supporting lecturers and students to capitalise on some of these possibilities, including with technology. And then again, we've been kind of capturing the impact and evaluating and disseminating some of the experiences of our staff and students. In your own time, you can take a look at the literature that underpins some of the work. We did a kind of a scoping literature review with a very practical focus to find out what were staff doing, what were educators doing across the world to support students in their assessment. And really, we kind of arrived at sort of three core themes. So students and staff can be partners in assessment by doing things like engaging in self-imperial assessment or by working together to co-create assessment activities and assessment criteria or by working together to kind of collaboratively grade a piece of work. So these kind of broad areas are ways in which staff and students can come together in assessment. I'll pop another link into the chat, which again, I don't expect you to have a look at now, but it's something you can take a look at in your own time for greater detail. But we developed some guidance for staff and students as to how to work together in assessment partnership. Nope, just wanted to check is my internet connection still okay? Yeah, great, thanks, Sandra. Yeah, all good. Yeah, just wanted to check there. So again, in your own time, folks, you can take a look at the link that I've pasted into the chat or the link that you can see on screen there, bit.ly forward slash sapia. But from our literature survey, we kind of distilled down a couple of practical things staff and students can do to work together in assessment partnership. And it goes along with kind of a continuum of maybe low level or low risk partnership. So things like maybe allowing students a choice in what their submission date might be or allowing students choice in their method or their topic for their assessment and so on. And moving up along the continuum, we start to engage in maybe more deeper forms of partnerships of things like supporting students in self and peer assessment, students coming together in peer reviews, students co-designing, co-creating assessment briefs and criteria with their teachers and so on. And this isn't necessarily a kind of a checklist or it's a kind of a linear progression, but staff and students might mix and match a couple of these approaches and maybe take some of these approaches in combination if they're choosing to come together in partnership. And as I said before, I think a lot of us maybe are doing this kind of stuff already, particularly giving students choice and maybe a topic for their assessment or when they might like to submit or how they might like to present their assessment. That's something I think that is quite commonplace in education, but we've perhaps never really considered that that is us inviting students in to make some decisions about their assessment. And that is at the heart of what partnership is. And again, we gathered some advice from students and from staff around, how can they make partnership a success and going back again to some of the responses that we folks gave in the polls earlier. Students really want an opportunity for dialogue to discuss assessment, to ask for guidance and advice and so on. And that can be so helpful for an educator as well engaging in that dialogue so they'll get to see things from the student point of view and the student perspective and so on. Students definitely want some good direction and some fairness when it comes to assessment. They do want some criteria or be able to kind of influence and shape that criteria and know what they're getting into and know where they can get help and assistance when they're working together in assessment. And students really do enjoy choice. They enjoy being able to decide where they want to go and how they want to apply their passion for a particular topic when it comes to an assessment. So following some of this kind of advice can also really help to create a culture of partnership in your classroom with your students. So I want to kind of jump back over to you folks now for a second. And here from you, I've spoken a little bit now about some of the ways in which staff and students can come together, things like engaging in self-imperial assessment, things like working together to co-create some assessment criteria or come up with assessment tasks together. And I'd really like to know now, have you folks ever done anything like that? So I'm going to open up another VVox poll for you here now. And I'd love to now get a sense from you folks. Have you ever implemented any of these kind of things, yourself, peer assessment, self-assessment, working with students to come up with criteria? Are these things that you've ever done? I've popped the VVox link in the chat again. If anyone has joined and they want to click to open the VVox, you'll see the poll on screen there. And I'll give you a moment to respond to that. And again, if you have never implemented any of these things before, if they're all totally new to you, that's absolutely fine. We're all here to learn. But if any of you have been doing stuff like this, it would be really, really interesting to know. And whilst people are responding, if there's anyone who'd like to come in on the mic and maybe share their experience of trying out something like this, that'd be very welcome as well. You can put your hand up and we'll be able to bring you in on the mic. And you might tell us briefly about any time you've deployed one of these practices yourself. Just see, we'll just take a look at the results coming in. So some people are using Moodle Workshop for peer assessment. That's wonderful. We've been doing that a lot in DC at the moment. I'm a big fan of Moodle Workshop. I know not everyone is, but I adore Moodle Workshop. I think it's an excellent, excellent activity. Some people say, no, not yet. They haven't tried any of these practices. Again, more people saying peer and self assessment. Sometimes in secondary school have done stuff. People are starting conversations about this process. Excellent. Good, good. Some practices, yeah. Lovely students creating tests. Students choose which assessment will count towards their grade. Oh, that's really good. That's really helping to empower students there, letting them choose what can contribute to their final grade. Some lovely examples there. Fantastic. Yeah, and this is a really important point here as well. Students might be able to engage as partners to some extent, but maybe you might be constrained by rules and regulations around to what extent can students determine assessment. And these are all, I suppose, different factors that we have to balance. And these are some ideas and some general approaches, but it really depends on your own context and your own requirements as to what is appropriate for you to adopt in your own given scenario. And I can see Sebastian has posted in a link to a website in the chat there. Sebastian, I don't know if you'd like to come in on the mic and maybe share a little summary of the website there that you've posted. Hello, everybody. Can you hear me? Yes. OK. The site I've pointed to is a site about a method that has been developed by an English teacher in France. I teach English myself in secondary school. And it's a method that has to be adapted by each teacher to their own capacities, what they want to do. They can take what they want from it and they must adapt it to their students. And I used it with secondary school students, namely from 10 to 15 approximately. And it works wonderfully. And some of the approach was to prepare everything in advance and have multiple spots in the classroom where you have dictionaries or pictures or the works they have to do and the correction that they can go and see. And they use the board. It's a whiteboard, but it's for themselves. I almost never write on a board. They do it themselves. And I teach them to not erase what the others have done, but change it eventually or correct it. But keep track of mistakes. Lovely. And at some times, I just made them think about what they have done during the class. And the only homework they have to do is think about what they have done and what they will do for the next class. Excellent. They have not been to write and everything is done inside the classroom so that they're not overloaded with their work at home because they're young and they need to rest and to do something else so that their fresh minds can develop. And that's the whole idea. And if they're not fit to learn English because I teach English, at that particular time, they can go and read in a corner or whatever because sometimes it's not the right time. Excellent. Yeah. I like that approach. It's kind of taking a lot of things together. It's really giving that sense of students learning and working together collaboratively, almost peer-recessing and improving upon each other's work and through that way learning together. A real sense of empowerment and collaboration there which I think came through in one of our earlier V-Vox polls. That sounds like a really, really interesting. I would just like to add one thing is that I have a small axle sheet where they can self-assess themselves and they have three colors. One which means that they can help others. One on the other end which means that they need help. And one which means that they know the things or they can do but they don't feel able to help others. And that way everybody can see who has done what and who can do what and who to call to help or who to help. And they can freely walk around the classroom and help each other, change groups, whatever. That's so lovely. There's a lovely sense of... And I'm sorry that the site is in French but maybe you understand the approach. Examples, videos and everything. And that was a real change in my approach. Good, good. It sounds like it's been very useful for you. And that website is letlearn.eu which you posted in the chat there. So that's a wonderful approach Sebastian. Thanks a million for sharing that. And again, if anyone else has any other interesting practices like that that they'd like to share, please do pop those in the chat as well for others to see. And I can see Catherine has posted a very helpful tip there is that even though that website is in French, web browsers will hopefully translate it for us non-French speakers. So thanks very much for that, Catherine. Lovely, lovely. And that kind of leads us nicely, folks, on to kind of the next segment here where I want to kind of just tell you a little bit about what some of our lecturers in DCU have been doing to support student partnership and assessment and in particular what tools and Moodle they've been using. And as I said at the outset, for some of you who are maybe a bit more experienced with Moodle, a lot of this might seem maybe old hash to you. But for those of you who are new, there might be some interesting ideas in here and definitely I'd love just like Sebastian has kindly done. I'd love for you to maybe share in the chat any particular things you've done with your students in involving Moodle. So as I said over the past three years or so, my team and I have been supporting lecturers in DCU to implement some of these assessment partnership practices with their students across different subjects. And they've been mixing and matching a lot of different approaches. So we can see here across a wide range of subject areas, we've had a lot of lecturers and students coming together to maybe choose different modes and topics of their assessment. Peer review and peer assessment has been a popular partnership approach as well. Co-creation of quiz questions, again, more choice, peer assessment as a form of formative feedback before making a final submission and so on. And again, continuing through on that trend, a lot of co-creation in year two, peer assessment and peer reviews again and choice all kind of coming back again and again as being really popular partnership approaches. And you can see again, our pilots expanded into new subject areas as well. And I think this is really nice to see. And again, Sebastian, thanks for your contribution there speaking about English language learning in secondary schools. And I think when we see here on screen in DCU, the wide variety of subject areas that we've been piloting, partnership in, I think it really shows us that these kinds of approaches work in all disciplines, in all subject areas. It's not just something for language learning, it's not just something for humanities and social sciences, but it can really work in a lot of different subject areas and disciplines. And again, coming into our third year of the project again, a lot more choice and peer assessment and self-assessment and so on, being utilised by our staff and our students. And throughout these three years, really, Moodle and both some of the core plugins and some third-party plugins have been really, really useful in facilitating this because very often when I speak with lecturers about student partnership and opening up assessment and allowing students to give their suggestions or play some sort of role in assessment, my lecturers always say to me, oh, well, I have 50 students in my class, I have 100 students, I can't have one-on-one conversations with them all the time and ask them for their opinion and ask them to get involved in assessment. But this is why we have such wonderful tools in Moodle to help facilitate and streamline that engagement between teacher and students so that partnership approaches like this can be implemented well. So as I mentioned, things like choice have been really, really popular in DCU in the last little while. And choice can be in a variety of formats, so it can be choice of submission date, choice of a topic for one's assessment, choice of what mode or method a student is going to use in their assessment. And whenever I think of giving students choice or allowing students to vote or allowing students to pick something, of course, my mind naturally goes to the Moodle choice activity, which by its name is there to give students a choice in things. And it's been really interesting talking with some of our students at DCU in the last little while about this idea of choice because a lot of our students would say they do welcome choice, they do want to have that agency to decide where they want to go with their assessment, but they do like choice that is bounded. Our students often say that when they are given unlimited total free rein with their assessment, they can actually be a little overwhelmed by that. So even in providing choice to students, I think there's still a really important role for a teacher to be there as a facilitator and maybe kind of put some helpful scaffolding or helpful boundaries around choices. So for example, one thing I do in one of my modules is I invite my students to select when they would like to submit a draft of their assessment to me so that I can give them formative feedback. And I allow them to choose their own submission date because I'm conscious they have many competing deadlines and some of them want to work on their assessment quite early and get it into me and then get feedback. Others might need a little bit more time to work on their assessment before they submit it to me. And at the same time, I know that they like the idea of working towards a deadline of some kind. So I give them a couple of options for when they want to submit and then I then configure relevant assignment dates for them so that they have something to work towards. And that is something very, very simple and straightforward, but it really feels like the student is kind of crafting their assessment deadline to suit them and to suit their needs. And another example along those lines of something one of my colleagues in DCU did recently was they used a plugin called Group Choice. And again, I'd love to know in the chat, have any of you heard of the Group Choice plugin? Do any of you use the Group Choice plugin? We have it installed on our Moodle at DCU and we love it, we think it's fantastic. It's essentially an activity very like the choice activity where a student can choose to place themselves in a particular group. So what one of my colleagues has done is she has a module that runs over 10 weeks and each week she covers a new topic in European geopolitics and what she wants is she wants to invite her students to pick one of the 10 topics that they feel most passionate about and to write a position paper on that. But she's also conscious, you know, when it comes to the end of the semester, you know, if someone is really interested in the first topic, you know, that was so long ago that they had done that, that they might have kind of, you know, fallen out of love with it or they might have gotten kind of confused and overwhelmed with all the other topics. So she wanted to give students an opportunity to start working on their assessment, you know, as soon as they had covered the topic in glass to kind of capture that piece of passion and interest that they had in that topic at that point in time. So she used the group choice to set up each of the 10 topics was a particular group and then the students after, you know, they had kind of explored the topic, if they were really passionate about it and wanted to write their assessment on the topic, they would use the group choice to put themselves into that group. And then on the moodle assignment, there were some group overrides where then kind of different deadlines were set for them to work towards to submit their particular paper for that particular topic. So it worked really, really well, giving students that sense of agency, that sense of empowerment, but also the teacher was still there scaffolding, you know, it wasn't like it was all thrown wild open and the students were left on their own to pick a topic and work away and manage their own time. Like they had a bit of choice and were able to follow their passion, but the teacher was still there providing some scaffolding and some, you know, a time limited window for them to submit their assessment. So that's something that has worked really, really well for us. I can see Elizabeth in the chat has given a thumbs up to the group choice and it's a big thumbs up from DCU on the group choice. And I can see Doug has posted in the chat that they use a tool called group tool, which seems to be the same as group choice. And I haven't come across the group tool plug in myself, but if it does something similar like allowing students to place themselves into groups, Doug, then I imagine it probably does do something very similar to the group choice. And is that something, Doug, that you and your colleagues find very, very useful? Is it something you would use quite regularly with your students? You can let us know in the chat or you can come in on the mic if you'd like. Yeah, so Doug sometimes uses it once or twice per semester. Okay, very good. And that's the other thing as well. I mean, this kind of thing is always a balance, you know? And, you know, you don't want to be overloading your students with, okay, you have to choose this and then you have to choose that and then you have to do this and then you have to do a peer assessment and then you have to come together and co-create a rubric. A lot of that obviously can be overkill for students. So I think in choosing any of these partnership approaches and giving students any opportunity for choice in their assessment, it is a balancing act not to overload them. And Sebastian making a very important point there as well in the chat that any kind of third party plugins and so on that we might be interested in installing in our Moodles obviously need to be implemented and installed and tested and so on by the relevant site administrators. So, you know, some of these are some core tools that are available in Moodle and some of the ones we're discussing here are third party tools which may or may not be available to you but, you know, I'm a big believer in extending our Moodles and installing useful third party plugins to support good teaching, learning and assessment practices. Some other things our staff in DC have been doing around that kind of provision of choice, for example is allowing students different ways of expressing their assessment. So we have Mahara as our portfolio platform at DC and we have it integrated with our Moodles so that when students create a Mahara portfolio they can submit it to a Moodle assignment so that it can be graded. And in one of our examples last year my colleagues who teach physical education allowed students to do a reflection and document their learning on the module and express that learning in any portfolio. So as the students were performing different physical education activities they were recording one another. They were taking diagrams of the body and the anatomy and annotating how the body was moving in physical education. They were recording audio reflections and so on and combining that into their e-portfolio and because they had a choice of these different multimedia to include they were able to make each one of those e-portfolios very personal and very individualized which again really helped to engage them in the assessment because they felt like they were owning it and they had their own agency in the assessment and that's another method that worked very well was allowing the use of an e-portfolio. Sometimes as I mentioned when we want to maybe invite students in to come together and work on a rubric together or decide or vote or give their opinion on how certain assignments should be weighted and so on. It can be a bit difficult to manage that. If you have a class of 50 students how do you get them all to give their opinion on what criteria should be an degrading rubric? Well, one of my colleagues used a discussion forum really well for this. So again, she came up with kind of four suggested criteria for an assignment and she used a discussion forum to create one thread for each one of these criteria and she invited the students to kind of give their opinion, give their commentary. Did they feel that was an appropriate criteria? What weighting did they think should be given to the criteria? What did they think a high mark would look like in that particular criteria? And then by using the discussion forum to kind of structure the conversation the students were able to give their input and give their suggestions for the rubric and then the lecturer was able to kind of distill all of that down and produce a finalised rubric. So it was a very structured way of getting students' opinions on the grading criteria and on what should go into the grading rubric. So it was a really, really nice way of managing it because otherwise again, how else would you invite students to contribute towards the grading criteria? It needs to be managed and scaffolded in some way and she in that particular case found the discussion forum really useful for negotiating the rubric with students. Another example, again, this idea of co-constructing of working together with students, another one of my lecturers, she was a history lecturer and she took a really, really interesting partnership approach with her students where she wanted all of her students to contribute to a really, really big moodle quiz. So she asked each of her students to compose some multiple choice questions. So the students had to come up with a good question stem, they had to come up with some options, they had to compose feedback for each option and then they had to compose some overall feedback for the question. And there was a very handy spreadsheet that we in DCU got a hold of many years ago at a moodle moot, a really, really handy spreadsheet which enables you to kind of type in your question stem, your question answers, your question feedback, et cetera. And it produces it out in the gift format which can then be very easily imported into a moodle question bank. And in this particular pilot, she found that the students really, really got involved, they were all trying to write the best quiz question, they were all trying to write really difficult quiz questions to catch each other out. And in the end, the students all co-created a quiz and they all took the quiz and really learned from the process because obviously in order to create a good quiz question, the students really needed to know the topic, they needed to know what the right answer was and why that was the right answer and they needed to come up with some plausible incorrect answers and also be able to compose feedback as to why they were incorrect. So it was a really, really engaging learning experience and again, the teacher was there as the manager, as the facilitator and moodle was used as the engine to deploy the quiz question. So really, really good. And Elizabeth has posted in a chat there the moodle plugin called student quiz which I've heard of that plugin before. Now, I haven't ever used it myself but it works along the same principle I believe, Elizabeth, where the students obviously can co-construct questions. I'd be interested in Elizabeth, you can let us know in the chat or you can come on the mic for a moment if you want. Is that a plugin that you yourself have used? I've definitely seen it being talked about at different moodle moots over the years. It certainly seems like a really, really well-developed plugin. And maybe Doug, who is telling us is the administrator of his own moodle. He'll fortuitously be able to install all these suggested plugins now that we're talking about here today. And thanks, Elizabeth, for getting back. It's very useful and I'm very used in Elizabeth's university, so fantastic. Thanks for that, Elizabeth. And Doug has used it as well. Doug saying that have students quiz listeners after they give speeches. Okay, very good. Sebastian saying students create games in groups based on the lesson after each subject evaluation. I like that a lot of group work going on with your students, Sebastian. That's a really, really nice approach getting them to work together. And Tess here saying, asked each group of learners to create their own grading rubric and have the group leader grade their work accordingly. Lovely, that's really, really empowering your learners now to think about their grading criteria and think about what makes a good piece of work and so on. Really, really, really nice examples here of how to work together with your students in assessment partnership. I'm conscious of time, folks. So I might just kind of quickly share another one or two examples with you and then please do keep your, you're all sharing some wonderful examples here in the chat. So I'd love to hear some more from you. One thing that we've mentioned, and this came up in our V-Box poll a moment ago as well, the idea of kind of peer assessment where students peer reviewing one another is a really, really powerful form of student partnership and assessment because it means students are kind of acting in the role of an assessor. They're performing some evaluative judgment on their own work or one of their classmates' work, et cetera. They're maybe working with some grading criteria, maybe applying a rubric and really having to think about what does a good piece of assessment look like and how would I grade it and what does that mean for me, et cetera. It can be a really, really deeply engaging piece of work and many of us might know the Moodle Workshop Tool which we are big fans of in D.C. and we've really been using the Moodle Workshop Tool a lot more. We do find obviously for the average lecturer there is a bit of a learning curve with the Moodle Workshop and I'm sure a lot of you might agree with that as well but it can be a really, really powerful tool if you manage to master it and we've been having some very successful experiences with using the Moodle Workshop Tool. Sometimes we use a rubric built into it and students are kind of rating each other and get a score at the end and sometimes we just use open-ended comments in the Moodle Workshop and we treat that more as peer review. Maybe students just helping each other out and giving each other some constructive feedback but that's been very positively received by both our staff and students and if you're not currently using Moodle Workshop for peer assessment, I'd really recommend you do. There's a third-party tool that we've also recently started using at DCU called Peer Work and I believe it was developed by some colleagues in the UK at City University of London and this is basically where students who are working together in a group are able to rate each other's performance in the group work activity. So it often helps students counteract that effect in group work or maybe not everyone is pulling their weight, not everyone is contributing equally. It allows students to be able to rate and kind of say, oh well, Sandra, Anna and Rob were in a group and maybe Rob wasn't very, very good and wasn't doing a lot of work so Sandra and Anna can rate Rob and kind of say, no, Rob didn't perform very good in that group and that provides really good insight into the group dynamics and Doug also saying that the chat peer work is a very good plugin. So again, if any of you are interested in that plugin, I think colleagues in the UK have developed it. We're really, really big fans of it here in DCU and separately on a very, very simple way of having students review and share work with one another. Some of our staff have used the Moodle database, another great tool for students sharing and contributing work amongst ourselves. They would often maybe have students working together in groups. They would have the separate groups mode enabled on the database and students can upload and share maybe some of their draft assessments with other group members and offer read through it and offer some kind of casual conversational feedback to one another. So it's a much more simpler way of performing peer review and peer sharing without the need maybe of a highly structured Moodle workshop activity. And then lastly, sharing exemplars with students is another good form of assessment partnership, getting them again to read through and look at some exemplars and think about how other students have approached an assessment. And we very often gather together some exemplars in something as simple as a Moodle page resource and share it with our students. And then again, oftentimes where students might want kind of specific areas for feedback, we often use a very handy plugin called Moodle board which has often been described as being kind of like a catalyst for Moodle, a kind of a digital canvas where students can add posts to. We often have students kind of making kind of quick short posts on the Moodle board saying, okay, I'd like feedback around academic writing. I'd like feedback around argumentation and presentation, et cetera. And that then allows the teacher to kind of direct what areas of feedback are most needed for each student. So those are just again, a few very high level approaches of how our staff and students have been using Moodle tools at DCU to support student partnership and discipline. Great suggestions in the chat as well, things like student quiz, student tools like group tool. See Elizabeth has posted one there as well, tool called publication as well, which I'll make sure to check out. I know these slides are available on the Moodle Academy website. So I'll let you look at these in your own time. You'll see some really interesting survey results from our staff and students who were asked about their experiences of some of these partnership approaches. And overall students and staff really saying, they really enjoyed the opportunity to be involved in their assessment. They felt it helped them learn, they felt it helped them adhere to academic integrity. Our staff as well saying, it really opened up learning on the module that really led to greater student engagement, giving them these options to be more participatory in their assessment. So you can take a look at those on the slides on Moodle Academy after the fact, but suffice to say it's been quite successful at DCU. And I do hope that some of you might think of other ways that you can involve students as partners in teaching, learning and assessment and using some of these Moodle tools to support that. And if you're interested in learning more, please reject me at rob.nownee at dcu.ie. But for now, I'll just leave it at that, I think, and just say to you all again, thank you very much for your time here today. And I'm happy to hang on for another few minutes in the chat, but for now I'll stop sharing and hand you back over to Sandra. Okay, so if you have enjoyed this session, we'd love you to consider getting involved further and help us grow by contributing to the development of Moodle Academy. You can do this by visiting our Get Involved course, which you'll find on the front page of the Moodle Academy site. You can suggest ideas for new webinars and courses, and you can vote on ideas that have been suggested by others already. We're always on the lookout for community members to help present webinars and co-create short online courses. And we'd love your help making Moodle Academy more inclusive. So if you're able to, please jump into our Translate Moodle Academy course and get started with helping us translate our courses and webinars into other languages. And of course, please help spread the word about Moodle Academy by telling your colleagues about the courses we offer and the events we run. When you complete a course, you will earn a badge. You will also receive a badge if you present a Moodle Academy webinar, like today's session. Educators might like to think about getting involved with the Moodle Educator Certificate. You can take the Are You Ready for the MEC quiz and one of our certified service providers will support you through the certification process. Thank you for joining us today. We hope you found this useful and we hope to see you in our Moodle Academy courses and upcoming webinars. And thank you to everyone for their contributions and to Rob for being here today. It's been a very interesting session.