In a point in time Skodak decided not not support separate student wikis... and all the UPC team exclaimed "Yay!" and we had a beer to celebrate it.
Separate student wikis create weird dilemmas to deal with, because students enroll and unenroll. And yet, pedagogically, there is no point to have a non collaborative wiki going on.
So we don't support it... Yay!
But... there are separate student wikis out there in Moodle 1.x wikis and even on nwiki setups.
So...
We cannot throw away that content or somebody will be mad at me.
The proposed solution :
- we create a group with the teacher(s) and the student owner of the wiki, and place the content there.
Any insights on the issue?
Migrating separate student wiki to wiki 2.0... big time dilemma
by Ludo (Marc Alier) -
Number of replies: 2
In reply to Ludo (Marc Alier)
Re: Migrating separate student wiki to wiki 2.0... big time dilemma
by Petr Skoda -
My reasoning was that other modules also need this mode of operation - "separate students". Since 1.9 we have the groupings that were designed to extend the uses of groups and allow exactly this. It is still marked as experimental, but groupings will be enabled in all 2.0 (only groupmemebrsonly will be kept experimental).
The workflow would be pretty simple, first go to group admin UI and let Moodle create new grouping with one group for each user in the course. Then create a new wiki and set the grouping there. Everybody will have his/her own wiki. This should be fairly easy for upgrades too.
If we decide to implement separate student wikis the problems are:
* a lot more access control + more complex db structure
* we need new UI for user selection so that teachers may actually access the user wikis
* we need to handle cases where users are enrolled/unenrolled in the middle of the course
* we can not change the mode of wiki from user to group
* other modules need to do the same in order to keep consistency
The coding and maintenance costs would be higher, on the other hand we would have a feature that probably no other wiki has and probably very few ppl use in the real life, also the UI would be cluttered with extra controls and the wiki would not be consistent with the rest of our modules.
I personally think we should stop abusing modules for something they are not designed for, wiki is by definition a collaboration tool, so we should imo encourage group work in wiki and just describe potential workaround in case somebody really wants to use them in a different way. If somebody needs a personal notepad with wiki syntax support, it could be a My Moodle(dashboard) block. We should also concentrate on grading of work done by students in wikis, this could be best done as new gradebook reports that other modules may share.
Another example is the Forum module, it could be hacked to support one-on-one teacher-student communication, but it would be an ugly hack with many problems, so instead I created the new consultation module. News forum type is yet another example of problematic - there are so many differences in news and forum discussions that it will be significantly easier to create News module instead of trying to fix the current new forum subtype.
We had a little disagreement with Martin over this issue, unfortunately I do not remember if I managed to persuade hit the last time we discussed this ;-)
The workflow would be pretty simple, first go to group admin UI and let Moodle create new grouping with one group for each user in the course. Then create a new wiki and set the grouping there. Everybody will have his/her own wiki. This should be fairly easy for upgrades too.
If we decide to implement separate student wikis the problems are:
* a lot more access control + more complex db structure
* we need new UI for user selection so that teachers may actually access the user wikis
* we need to handle cases where users are enrolled/unenrolled in the middle of the course
* we can not change the mode of wiki from user to group
* other modules need to do the same in order to keep consistency
The coding and maintenance costs would be higher, on the other hand we would have a feature that probably no other wiki has and probably very few ppl use in the real life, also the UI would be cluttered with extra controls and the wiki would not be consistent with the rest of our modules.
I personally think we should stop abusing modules for something they are not designed for, wiki is by definition a collaboration tool, so we should imo encourage group work in wiki and just describe potential workaround in case somebody really wants to use them in a different way. If somebody needs a personal notepad with wiki syntax support, it could be a My Moodle(dashboard) block. We should also concentrate on grading of work done by students in wikis, this could be best done as new gradebook reports that other modules may share.
Another example is the Forum module, it could be hacked to support one-on-one teacher-student communication, but it would be an ugly hack with many problems, so instead I created the new consultation module. News forum type is yet another example of problematic - there are so many differences in news and forum discussions that it will be significantly easier to create News module instead of trying to fix the current new forum subtype.
We had a little disagreement with Martin over this issue, unfortunately I do not remember if I managed to persuade hit the last time we discussed this ;-)
In reply to Petr Skoda
Re: Migrating separate student wiki to wiki 2.0... big time dilemma
by Ludo (Marc Alier) -
As I said Petr... Yay!
For me the only issue is the migration, so no data gets lost, and I think we have pretty much covered it.
For me the only issue is the migration, so no data gets lost, and I think we have pretty much covered it.