Rating student work in forums

In chapter six we looked at setting up class discussions and facilitating peer review activities with forums. Since this chapter is about assessing learning in Moodle, let's go back to forums and see how to use ratings that end up in the grade book. I'll open a forum that has some student activity. First I'll scroll down to the activities block and select forums that way I can see which forums have unread posts and which ones I need to review. I'll go to this one, student expectations.

You can see in the instructions that I've outlined how students can earn points for their own discussion posts. One point for including their name, three points for stating their goal for taking the class and so on. I also tell them they can earn up to five points for as many as three replies to their fellow students. You'll see I mention they get no credit for weak answers like "Good Job" smiley face. Now let's see how I would assign ratings according to these guidelines. Below my instructions we see a list of discussion topics. I'll click the subject of the discussion in the discussion column.

I'll start with "Hey, I'm Jamal." When that discussion opens I can see the student's post and any replies. At the bottom left corner of each discussion topic or reply I see that the rating for this forum is set up as sum of ratings. In chapter six we also saw that rating options include count of ratings, average of ratings, maximum, and minimum. Next to that is a menu that says rate. I open the menu and scroll. I can see it has 25 points possible because that's how many points this entire forum activity is worth.

This discussion meets the requirements I listed in the instructions so I'll give it a full 10 points. Now let's move to the replies. This reply is strong but doesn't include a citation. I'll give it four points out of five. I can see if a discussion or reply has been rated by the rating score listed next to the menu. If you set up the forum as average of ratings, then the first number will show the average score the student has earned so far for that discussion or reply. Here we see the points that were given for that post.

The parenthetical number is the number of people who have rated the discussion or reply. If I click the rating score number, it shows me who gave the rating and the rating score. In this case it will just be me. I'll close this window. This can be useful if you have a co-teacher, teaching assistant, or a grader. Also, if you allow students to rate forum discussions and replies, then you can see who gave what score. Moodle does all the work and the math behind the scenes updating the grade book with these points as soon as I select a score from each rating menu.

Since this forum is set up as sum of ratings it adds up the rating scores. I don't have to keep track of how many replies a student as submitted. Moodle won't let that student earn more than the maximum 25 points for this activity. Now we've seen how to rate forums. In the next video we'll look at how to create an assignment.