I am gathering feedback and suggestions for a new module that would be a cross between a forum and a workshop.
Problem Statement: Free-form discussions do not encourage participation from all students but rather allow lurking. We have found that for our formal, facilitated training modules, treating discussions as activities, with a requirement and deadline to post as well as a requirement and deadline to reply to others' posts, succeeds in ensuring everyone has a chance to speak as well as a chance to be heard. However, we have accomplished this through human instruction only. The task of monitoring posts, and ensuring a reply is given to each post, is best handled by Moodle.
Proposed Solution: One solution this this problem would be to implement what the Harvard Law School's H20 project calls (in typical law school metaphorical fashion) the Rotisserie. The closest existing module in Moodle is the Workshop. In fact, by stripping down the Workshop, I think we would have about 95% of the functionality we'd be looking for. The only improvement upon both the Rotisserie and the Workshop would be that, like a regular discussion forum, students should be free to add as many posts as they choose, which necessarily means they may comment on any post they choose. This is fine, because we wish not to limit participation but rather set a floor of each student speaking at being "heard" at least once, which is the floor set by the Workshop.
I suggest reading the H20 project description for further elaboration on the pedagogical merits of this approach.
Has anyone else adopted this approach to running online discussions? If so, is there any interest in making this module happen? While I am passable at PHP coding, I would probably need significant help to tackle this project if there is interest, so I'd also like to know if there are others willing to pitch in (or, heck, just do the whole thing).
By the way, as an addendum to this topic, I would like to know if the upcoming versions of Moodle adopts a more object-oriented approach to course activities. I would like see the Assignment become a base prototype for other, more specific Assignments. In our courses, deadlines are highly important, and we have found that we have to point Assignments at activity modules that don't have timeline built in (discussions, journals), which is both redundant and confusing to users. Many of our complex, sequenced activities have multiple deadlines, so being able to create "activities-of-activities" would also be desirable. If anyone knows where I can post and get discussion around this suggestion I'd be much obliged.