Abstract:

On previous Innovative Education Projects (IEPs) carried out by a teaching team of the University of Malaga, we have found that the MOODLE workshops are a very interesting tool for a continuous learning.

The Workshop tool can be configured in several ways. After different approaches we have selected one in which three main stages are set as follows:
• The students try to solve a problem for about a week, and then upload it to the platform.
• The teacher will present on the platform the correct solution for the problem together with the guidelines for the assessment of the different sections of the task, as a simple scoring rubric.
• The platform redistributes anonymously the work uploaded by the students to so that each student receives two or three works that must criticize and assess, also with time limited to one week, performing a peer-review which is maintained as double blind as much as possible.

Thereafter, the review is uploaded also, so that each student receives two or three reviews and grades from their colleagues. In some cases, each student should also perform a self-assessment of his work. We have tried different variations arround these main lines, for instance, by switching stages two and three: i.e., a correct solution remains unpublished until the end of the peer-review process.

We have evaluated the benefits of this teaching-learning process using several tools, such as analysis of the skills development, satisfaction of the teaching team, and satisfaction of the students as expressed in corresponding anonimous polls.

After several years using these Workshops in several subjects we have found an important degree of satisfaction, except for those few years in which technical problems were observed associated with changes of the software version of MOODLE. Only one exception is observed to this satisfaction: Most of the students do not appreciate any interesting value in the peer-review process. This point of view is not shared with the teaching team, that consider the peer-review to be an important learning tool.

Keywords:

MOODLE, workshops, peer-review.