The Workshop module is excellent, but we have some use cases that it is currently not fulfilling. One of those is to provide peer evaluation to other members in their group for their performance on a group project. In these cases, students are reviewing one another based on past experience, not based on anything the student has submitted, and currently the instructors are required to force the students to submit something for them to be able to review one another.

There are a few things that would need to change in order to provide this functionality:

1. Students who do not submit will need to be able to be allocated for assessment. This will be controlled through the setting detailed below.
2. A new setting needs to be added in the Workshop settings -> Submission settings, called "Allow assessment of empty submissions", with a checkbox. This setting should default to unchecked to reduce confusion when trying to do a manual allocation without empty submissions, which is done fairly often.
3. Random Allocation will need to have a new checkbox option, called "Participants can assess empty submissions". This should default to unchecked. It should be disabled until "Participants can assess without having submitted anything" is checked. Checking the "Participants can assess empty submissions" box will treat empty submissions exactly like normal submissions, allocating them to be assessed.

These changes will help to extend the flexibility of Workshop without interfering with current workflows or adding confusion, other than the existence of a couple new settings.