Being active in the Moodle community, we’re always looking for gaps in functionality and ways to support enabling functional possibilities through appropriate and intuitive means of development, guided of course by optimised back and front-end user experience considerations. Recently, we became aware of the need for ‘social confirmation’ during answer checking for students. Namely, a peer-based comparison system, which can be a valuable tool for teachers, and students in particular reviewing answers and their progress against anonymously supplied ‘answers’ that have been given by other peers within same course and cohort. It can be motivating, and eye-opening, and also, it can serve as a complex way for educators to create a collective consciousness around and towards certain knowledge responses, whilst also allowing the educator to review a structured feedback and collection of the kinds of responses students are giving in a ‘side-by-side’ view.
With this in mind, our eLearning development team have recently developed this component to meet this unique functionality of providing a ‘peer check’ capability in Moodle. What this means is that instead of the teacher, facilitator or educator only providing student’s ‘standard feedback’ through the traditional, non-dynamic formats, where static feedback is then distributed to students upon correct and incorrect response submissions, but in this case rather, they instead allow the students to populate information dynamically whilst they are attempting questions. This creates a catalogue of valuable, supporting feedback, especially when coupled with traditional feedback systems, where student can review their answer comparatively against a collection of other students who have attempted that same question.
This is useful so that a student can use social evaluation to assess their progress, as well as the level that they should be amidst a collection of other students and peers who are attempting the same course and undertaking the same lesson and assessment processes. As a online learning platform development company, we’re really happy to make further contributions to the wonderful approachability of the wonderful eLearning platform known as Moodle, and are proud to engineer another customisation useful to our clients and into the greater Moodle-sphere. Finally, just a side-mention, this particular feature is not limited by question type, and although we use it for short-answer responses, but also in multiple choice question types, where bar charts are used to illustrate most commonly selected answers of other peers, it can be used far beyond these mentioned contexts.
We’re happy to support the functional requirements of all Moodle platforms, existing within a web of devoted developers, eLearning companies, training organisations, businesses and institutions. Send through a message, no matter what you need to do, and we’ll get back to you soon.