David Mudrak's blog

But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.

– (Luke 15:31-32, NIV)

Yesterday, new workshop module has been committed into Moodle CVS HEAD and became a part of standard Moodle 2.0 distribution again. It’s been a long way to get into this stage but the real journey just starts. There are still some features to tune up and some known bugs to fix. The module seems to work pretty well, though. I had some real testing data from workshop 1.9 courses available (many thanks to those who could provide them) and from my point of view, the new UI gives clearer overview and more control over the activity.  However, my opinion does not matter – our good Moodle users will have to say what works for them and what does not.

Most of the legacy workshop features remained. There are two most significant differences. Firstly, new workshop puts two grade items into the course gradebook – a grade for submission (it est a grade that students get for their own work) and a grade for assessment (a grade that estimates the quality of the peer-assessment). Legacy versions of workshop automatically summed up these two grades. Nowadays, Moodle gradebook allows more way of aggregations. Teachers can set up their gradebooks to mimic the old behaviour, of course.

The second significant breakage of backward compatibility is in how the assessments of example submissions are evaluated. Example submissions are provided by teacher and students are expected to train the assessment process on them. Teacher can, for example, put an example of a really good work and a really poor one. In previous workshop version, grade for the assessment of example submissions was immediately calculated so the student got a feedback like “if you assessed this submission in this way, you would receive this grade for assessment”. In new workshop, evaluation of students’ assessment is more dynamic process. Teacher can use different methods of the grade calculation and change the input parameters of the calculation “on the fly”. Therefore, workshop module itself is not able to calculate the grade for assessment without teacher assistance. Instead, teachers just provide so called reference assessments of example submissions (where they express the quality of the submission) and such benchmark is then displayed to students. So students can compare their assessment with the teacher’s one but no grade can be calculated.

I hope the other improvements – namely the possibility to control the submission allocation for peer-assessment, manual switching of workshop phases, overall UI rework to make information intuitive and easy to understand – will compensate the lack of these dropped features. And who knows – maybe in some future version, we will find a way how to introduce them again in the new framework.