1. Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences
The practical use and limitations
of current Moodle “Workshops”
The problem: … timely and efficient
feedback to students is not easy especially
in large classes…

2. In semester formative assessment
 In semester individual assignments or group assignments
with individual components:
– Writing essays
– Portfolios
– Oral presentations
– Solving problems exercises
– Raising hypothesis exercises
– Analyse a publication
– Write a report
– ….

3. The bad news…

4. An idea…
 We (educators) are not the only ones being able to
provide formative feedback
 There are more students than teachers in the
classroom…
 …what if we provide them with the opportunity to
be the assessors?

5. PEER ASSESSMENT
 “Peer assessment is an arrangement for
learners to consider and specify the level,
value, or quality of a product or performance
of other equal status learners”. Topping,K.
2009

6. The good news
 “Formative peer assessment is likely to involve
intelligent questioning, [ ]. In addition, peer
assessment can enable earlier error and
misconception identification and analysis, which
can lead to the identification of knowledge gaps
and engineering their closure”. Topping,K. 2009
 So peer assessment (peer feedback):
– Saves your time
– Benefits the students

7. How to do that in Moodle?

8. Students allocation= the limitation
Manual if
groups
Limitation=
For each
student,
manual
allocation of all
the other
members of
the team as
reviewers AND
reviewees
Random if
no group,
just define the
# of students
each student
needs to
Peer assess

9. But then the grading is automatic…

10. Grading: Submission
Average mark
Robert the teacher ‘s mark can count
more than students’ mark and
ultimately he also has the power to
override the final mark in case of
discrepancies

11. Grading: Accuracy of peer assessment

12. Moodle calculates how
close the peer
assessment mark is to
the average mark
Joe
Jane
Average mark
Fair or harsh
you choose

13. Advice
 All students can see all the comments and marks
given to them
 So it is good to train students to provide
constructive and meaningful feedback

14. Ideas for you
 That presentation gives you a practical resource that can be used if
you are interested in designing assignments that involve self and peer
assessment,
 I generally have several occurrences of “workshop” activities involving
self and peer assessment during the semester and I mark the first one
(coefficient 16) for students to compare their mark to mine and then I
leave it to them for the next occurrences
 The power of the team being able to judge the work of team members
for a team assignment is great, it is difficult to free load, and even if I
don’t mark them all I can still verify their contribution if needed.

15. Technical Limitations that you need to be
aware of
 When students hit the submit button it is impossible to revert the
submission back to draft if students have had a problem or clicked
submit without joining their piece of work
 The manual allocation takes time whereas you would expect that there
would be a functionality that allows allocation within a group
 The feedback doesn’t allow the simultaneous use of rubrics and
comments like in normal assignments

16. THANK YOU FOR YOUR
ATTENTION

17. Ideas for you
 problem solving exercises (5 occurrences/semester) : where
students have to study some resources and formulate a hypothesis to
solve a problem as their peer assessed assignment, all students can
therefore confront/judge and mark everyone’s hypotheses before the
discussion in a group session
 Lit review and Class Book: each group of student is responsible for
writing a chapter so they have the opportunity to evaluate each other’s
summary of literature review and contribution to the chapter before
writing a coherent chapter for their group
 Pharmacy group work: students needs to individually find information
about a medicine and then synthetise their individual work in a group
assignment