OneDrive’s Forms for Excel can be a great tool for making peer grading more efficient
Learning management systems always aspire to cover as many bases as possible. Every platform is going to have strengths and weaknesses and often instructors will find supplements to account for these gaps and weaknesses.
In my opinion peer-assessment is one of Moodle’s weaker facets. Its core activity for this is the Workshop. Generally this tool is for students to submit a file, grade themselves in a self-assessment, before assessing others work as assigned in a group. The format is pretty prescriptive, even by Moodle’s standards, and is a bit ill-suited for activities where students are assessing presentations of others, or other in-class group work. Its been activities like this where I’ve opted to step out of Moodle and incorporate another tool, largely now OneDrive’s Forms for Excel.
We’ve been running Microsoft and Google as we slowly transition from one environment to the other here at UPEI and Google Forms has always been a powerful tool that I’ve returned to time again to build a quick, robust fix for some issue. Now that I’ve been consciously making the switch to practice more Microsoft skills I wanted to share some approaches and tips using Forms.
Firstly, you want to create your form from OneDrive
One thing that caught me on my transition from Google is the difference between Microsoft 365’s Forms and OneDrive’s Forms for Excel.
M365’s Form lets your download responses as an Excel spreadsheet where you can work the data. OneDrive’s version lets you run the Excel form online and begin working it before you even have data. This is a huge difference, this means we can set up the form and begin setting up how our spreadsheet will process the responses before students begin submitting the peer assessment.
Both versions will give you an online form that can host a variety of select response and written response questions. Within the form itself you can have the form collect the responder’s information so you know which student has submitted the grade, while a question in the form itself can be used to identify the group or student being graded.
When setting up my form I like to break things up into 3 sheets. The first is for collecting form responses of all the questions you want to collect, the second is for filtering and working on the data, and finally a last sheet for presenting the information we need for the assessment, such as a final grade and all of the feedback for each group.
You can use generative AI to help with some of the formatting
I’ve been cautious of being too reliant on AI or putting too much stock into its outputs. But this is an area where I’ve been largely happy with its outputs, though it can still try to solve things inelegantly. I’ve done some work with Google Sheets and have learned some of the base functions, thankfully the ones I use work in Excel as well. But undeniably there are commands in both platforms that I haven’t leveraged and might not even know about. Here, providing a tool like ChatGPT with a plain text description of what I’m trying to accomplish in Excel has generally given me at least a good starting point for my functions.
When sorting and understanding your data is going to be as unique as your peer assessment form it’s great to have a tool that can give you a bit of help if you aren’t the strongest Excel functioneer. Of course, trial and error still a regular part of my toolbox, especially if I was getting recommended a function I wasn’t familiar with from ChatGPT.
You can embed your form in a PowerPoint lecture
If you’re a windows user you can embed your form directly into a PowerPoint slidedeck. If you’re an instructor who uses PowerPoint in your lectures, this can be a handy way of avoiding some of that technical shuffle that comes when you drop out of PowerPoint and switch to a different platform.
The default embed will give your students a QR code they can scan to access the form from a smart phone.
This video from Cape Breton University covers the steps, but heads up that this doesn’t work if you’re a Mac user.
Of course, you can also link out to the form from your Moodle course which might be an easier method if you want students to provide more written details or completing the assessment outside of class.
If you’re interested in learning more, or seeing if this approach may better accomplish a goal or help you manage your peer assessments more efficiently, please feel free to reach out to us at your UPEI Teaching and Learning Centre!
