This is a quick and ugly explanation of how grades are calculated in the revised Workshop module being released in Moodle 2.0.

1. A (simplified) explanation of how grading works in the Moodle 2.0 Workshop activity Mark Drechsler

2. What is the workshop? “an advanced Moodle activity designed for peer-assessments within a structured review/feedback/grading framework” - David Mudrak, Workshop 2.0 developer

3. Comprises two assessments: An assessment of a piece of work submitted by a student (known as the ‘Grade for submission’), and An assessment of how well a student can assess the work of other students (known as the ‘Grade for assessment’)

4. Cycle of events

5. How are grades calculated? Lets look at an example which shows us the ‘grading sheet’ for the workshop after all submissions have been assessed and final scores have been calculated.

11. A confession... Note that this is a slight simplification – the comparisons of how well a student marked the work of another student is actually calculated against each marking criteria, not against the final average, but since the average is made up from the marking criteria then this simplified explanation will still hold true.

17. Summing up... The grade you will receive for your work will be an average of the grades given to you by your peers and your teacher. These may be weighted so that, for example, the grade of your teacher counts for more than the peer assessments.

18. Summing up... The grade you will receive for your ability to assess others will depend on how close your assessment was to the consensus of the group marking the same assignment. If your marking is consistent with the crowd (including your teacher), you will get good results.

19. Summing up... Not shown here, but... Your teacher can manually override any of the assessments if there appears to be anomalies There is no necessity for both teacher and students to mark the submissions, it can be just one or the other if desired Teachers can provide exemplar submissions and assessments Students can assess own work

20. With big thanks... ...to David Mudrak (http://blog.mudrak.name/) for taking up the challenge of redesigning the interface, rewriting the code and taking the time to explain the inner workings of Workshop 2.0 on moodle.org – awesome work.