General help

I agree with with Nic, and I think it would be useful to have some kind of terminology to distinguish between the different kind of groups we are talking about. Here is a first attempt:

Cohort: all the students registered in a course in a specific term.

Section: subdivision of cohort, all the students registered in sa pecific schedule-instance of a course. Ex: Section A of History 101 that meets Monday morning and section B that meets wednesday afternoon. Another way to look at it, a section is all the students listed on a specific attendance sheet.

Group: subdivision of section. A group of students that participate in a specific activity (practical, lab, recitation), of which there can be many instances in a single section. This corresponds more or less to the current implementation of group on moodle.

Team: As Nic, a small group of students teamed up specifically for the need of a project and common handing-in of the final result.

The idea of team, as NIc presented it, is very interesting, since it could also lead to an online team assessement process, i.e. a proces by which team members assess each other and their own contribution to the project.

Eric

I also have a few teachers who would like to grade a group as a whole, thus reducing the workload (grade 10 groups instead of 30 students).
I've tested out a modification of assignment that allows you to grade a group as a unit. This is just a hack to keep these teachers using moodle (rather than defecting to It's-learning). It works by making a list of students in each group and only showing one assesment/grade box for each group. Membernames are shown above the gradingbox.
  Group G1 (alf,pete,abe)
No changes made to database, when a group is graded, all member get the same grade/comment (can be refined by switching of this team-mode and giving individual marks to some/any student). I've added an extra option to assignment to switch this 'feature' on or off.
So far the hack picks up all submissions and shows an ikon for each. The assumption is that the group-members will make a single submission.
The hack is just 2 days old ... but looking good

I have charge of a team of language teachers all using the same textbook. There are 14 teachers, 26 classes and a lot (but not as many as expected) students. Perhaps about 300 students.

One of the things that moodle lacks, despite the fact that it is wonderful and provides so much, is features for the adminstration of multiple instances of the same course.

There are many ways of doing this.

One way would be to create dateless "topic" format courses for each class, and then having teachers perform the fairly simple operation of going to their course page and pressing a "I have done this topic" button.  This click would then set deadlines of the next tests for 7 (or X) days from the date of the button click. That way while there would be the problem of creating, changing, and generally maintaining 26 courses, the administrator would be free of having to change the dates of each course instance, since dates might be made dependent on that teacher "I've done this topic" click.

I also toyed with the idea of going with groups. Under that scenario I would have created just one course and then have all the different classes join that course in different groups. Then I would have been able to just edit one course page and change the views of that course page that 26 different classes (of students) see.

But as mentioned elsewhere on the forums, submission dates for quizes cannot be changed on a per group basis. My classes are on different days, and different days have different national holidays (not to mention typhoons) so pretty soon one group would be offered homework regarding a topic (chapter of the textbook) that they have not yet come to, while others would be given homework on topics (chapters of the textbook) that they have already done.

However, the possibility of groups as independent class entities seemed like one effective way of managing multiple classes: views of the course page are editable. The editing work would remain for those parts of the course that require different timeframes, but the resources and topic descriptors (and other non-time dependent parts) of the course would be controlled in one place.

As it stands, I am using backup and restore to populate the 26 courses. There seems to be no method of *changing* them other than by SQL or one by one. I think that the next 14 weeks are going to be the hardest of my life. I think that I have bitten off more than I can chew.

Tim Takemoto

PS, as i keep saying, all this is of course, a completely non-Moodle-like use of Moodle. I am an devoutly *eclectic* user of social-constructivist and behaviourist pedagogies. In other words I am a great fan (to say the least) of social interaction in the learning process, but see the carrot and the whip as being essential too. However, I see the place of LMS being in the latter camp - as a way of providing carrots and whipping. Hence I am attempting to "misuse", and suffering for my misuse of, Moodle in a behaviourist (multiple course, whip and carrot) way.