All about the Workshop Activity

Peer review is a powerful teaching strategy used by countless instructors across the spectrum of education and training. But what is peer review, and what makes it so powerful? Peer review is a collaborative learning strategy where learners review and assess each other’s work with guidance from the instructor. In many cases, learner's provide feedback on the quality of their peer’s work, and offer suggestions on how it could be improved.

This process enhances and personalizes the learning experience, and can potentially increase a learner's engagement, motivation, and self-confidence. By leveraging peer review in the your course, learners are encouraged to deepen their learning beyond rote memorization of facts. The Workshop activity also allows students to gain an insight into their own approach in comparison to their peers. For an instructor, this strategy can provide critical information about a learner's progress in the course, and can also help reduce the time you need to spend on administrative instructional tasks. This can be especially helpful in large online classes with dozens or hundreds of learners. 

The Workshop activity is a learner-focused tool allows learners to submit work, and be assigned work submitted by their peers for review and assessment based on criteria provided by their instructor. Workshop can also be configured to have the learners assess their own work. Instructors can also provide exemplars of sample submissions, and then publish good (or bad) examples of assigned work at the end of the activity.

Special Note: There is a reason Workshop appears at the end of the Advanced Usage of Moodle™️ training course. It is one of the most powerful activities you can add to your course, and as a result, is also one of the most technically complex. Though we strongly believe in the power of this activity, we only recommend attempting it if you have an established level of technical confidence with the other tools and resources in your course. 

So how does this activity work? Read on for a more in-depth explanation of how to configure and manage the Workshop activity in your course.