General plugins

Hi Troy,

Specification looks good - from what I've seen of the 1.9 module nothing is lost and I think there are a few new tricks in there.

One question though - any reason that if you're enhancing this that you wouldn't make it assessable if its a teacher/student dialogue? I think I've heard of situations where clients have used this (for example) as a conversation assessment tool for language teaching, but at the moment it doesn't integrate with the Gradebook so it needs to be done manually. Would be some twists in how to set up the assessment interface, would possibly need to be modelled on the marking of a forum (with a 'max marks' or 'avg marks' kind of concept) or have the grading apply to a single thread.

Anyway, that might be overthinking it, but wanted to chuck the idea in anyway.

Nice work

Mark.

Troy,

I am the Moodle Mentor for the University of Canberra English Language Institute (UCELI), where we have been using Moodle for all of our university/college entry pathway classes since late 2008.  Presently we have 16 such classes running. involving about 25 teachers and 240 students.

We have been using the Moodle Teacher-Student dialogue extensively with these classes primarily as an email substitute.  We like it, because it means that we can consolidate all teacher student communications for a given class in one e-location, which is more convenient during the life of a class and sometimes later when we have to review a past student's history (e.g. because of an appeal about results).

Noting that each of our classes has 3-4 teachers, we have employed two approaches as follows:

1.  in some cases a dialogue "Talk with the Teachers" is set up by the class Teacher and used by all teachers to exchange messages with individual students.  This is emerging as the more popular approach.

2.  in other cases, each teacher sets up their own dialogue, e.g. "Talk with Graham", noting that other teachers can of course access it (we make this point clear to students to avoid misunderstandings).

I would generally support Mark D's observations about the Version 2.0 functionality, though would note that I cannot see a need for associating it with the grade book.  One of the benefits of using dialogues, and fora, is that students can feel free to express themselves in these activities without fear of being assessed.  When we want to do that, we sometimes use the on-line text submission or journal activities, in addition to regular assignment submissions.

We did briefly look at the student-student dialogue function, but it did not capture interest in our environment.  Students prefer to text each other on their Mobiles.

Hope this is useful.  As I do not regularly check this forum, if you want any further input from me, it would be best to send me an email at the address below.

Regards,

Graham MacKinnell

graham.mackinnell@canberra.edu.au

Looks great! The teachers at my university use Dialogue for 1.9+, and when we implement M2 in the summer the Dialogue would be sadly missed!