Following the upsurge of interest in gamification* of learning (not to be confused with “edugames”), this is a quick “How to” article for a question that seems to come up a lot these days: “How can I implement star-ratings in Moodle?”
How to implement star-ratings in Moodle
Moodle already has an elaborate, editable, and adaptable grading and rating system built in so the process is relatively simple:
- Log in to Moodle as an administrator (editing teachers can create scales for their own courses too)
- Go to Site administration > Grades > Scales
- Add a new scale
- Fill in the Add new scale form, e.g.
- Name: Stars
- Scale: ☆☆☆☆☆, ★☆☆☆☆, ★★☆☆☆, ★★★☆☆, ★★★★☆, ★★★★★
- Description: (optional)
- Save
That’s it. Now, when you create/edit activities that support ratings, i.e. Forums, Glossaries, and Databases, the “Stars” rating will be available under the grading heading. By the way, you don’t have to limit your ratings to stars; you can also use more descriptive (text) ratings that inform learners in more meaningful ways, e.g.:
- Scale: Please tell us more, Interesting, Insightful, Highly perceptive
or…
- Scale: difficult to understand, fluent, complex, accurate, fluent and complex, fluent and accurate, complex and accurate, fluent complex and accurate
or…
- Scale: I strongly disagree, I disagree, I agree, I strongly agree
or…
- Scale: This is a bit like me, This is a lot like me, This is just like me
An important consideration to make when designing a set of ratings is how it may provide added incentives to learners to participate further in discussions, e.g. to elaborate on why they gave their particular rating to a forum post or glossary entry, or for the rating recipient to modify or elaborate on their post/entry, thereby encouraging deeper engagement and constructive discourse between learners. If learners find the ratings meaningful, helpful, and relevant to their learning needs, then they are more likely to use them to rate each others’ work (if you set the activity to allow peer rating).
Teachers can also use ratings for formative assessment, providing timely, easy to understand feedback so that they can act upon it during the activities, thereby using ratings to initialise/invite instructional scaffolding. Here’s an example scenario:
- a learner posts a comment in a discussion,
- the teacher or a peer rates the comment,
- the learner has an opportunity to respond, i.e. make changes or ask for elaboration,
- the discussion might continue on its current trajectory or move in a new direction
* Gamification is the use of game thinking and game mechanics in non-game contexts to engage users in solving problems. Gamification is applied to improve user engagement, return on investment, data quality, timeliness, and learning. Source: Wikipedia.org