Moodle Forums......

Re: Moodle Forums......

by Jason Hardin -
Number of replies: 6

Moodlerooms Advanced forums can be used at http://demo2k12.moodlerooms.com/.

Organizations interested in Joule features and possible hosting can also request a 15 day trial of Joule as well. The 15 day trial will be their own site to play with where the above link is like demo.moodle.org and gets recreated every 12 hours. There are also several videos on Youtube just search for advanced forums.

Both of these options provide a demo of all of the features we are suggesting be part of Moodle core, activity grading interface, advanced forums, alerts and streams, and outcomes (as of July 13th when we release it to our clients).

Because advanced forums is a separate forum type we have never recreated the forum search functionality or the display posts in the user's profile. This would all come by moving Advanced forums back to a core forum. As I said the migration would be as simple as search and replace hsuforum with forum in the code.

Nothing currently exists in Advanced forums for user notes beyond adding the notes block to a forum. https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-39707 lists all the features that have been added beyond core forums with the exception of manual grading through the activity grader interface. Which as Martin stated is not included because AGI is not in core.
As for the lose of the reply I agree that is the one feature that Forum NG has the I want to add to Advanced forum's nested view. It is my opinion that if you combine Forum NG's inline reply with Advanced forum's Nested view (AJAX load of forum and replies on demand) you would never use any other forum view unless you were visually disabled.

One thing that both advanced forums and forum NG fail at is an accessible view of the forums. I have seen nothing from OU in this respect for forums, but I know we will be implementing this functionality by August in advanced forums. Again as per the ticket above the design will be based on http://blog.bargirangin.com/2013/03/a-model-for-accessible-lms-discussion.html. I still need to get a public specification for this, working towards this by the first week of June. Multiple display options to me is a huge advantage of advanced forums over forum NG. A user is allowed to pick a view of the forums that is most productive for them.

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In reply to Jason Hardin

Re: Moodle Forums......

by Derek Chirnside -

Jason, I will check this out at the weekend.  (Busy in a big writing project at the moment)

Accessibility: just because we haven't seen anything from OU doesn't mean they have not got something.  They often have in house tweaks and addons to solve problems the rest of us live with.

Re other comments + information, food for thought, THANKS.

-Derek

 

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In reply to Derek Chirnside

Re: Moodle Forums......

by Tim Hunt -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

Some of the folks in the OU's Institute of educational technology are experts on accessibility and assistive technologies.

The regularly review parts of our VLE, and since Forum NG is one of the main tools used by students, it has been reviewed several time, and the accessibility problems fixed.

(IET reviews and testing have also fed into accessibility improvements in core Moodle over the years.)

So, if nothing else, ForumNG is very accessible.

The other area where ForumNG has more features than standard forum (in addition to student-visible features that everyone wants like subscribe to thread) is in the moderation features. Some of our courses are very big, and have very high traffic, and we insist on moderating them, sometime by teams of people. So, for example, when a post is 'deleted' by one moderator, it is actually only hidden, and another moderator could review that decision, and undelete the post. You can also delete any post, even if it has been replied to. You can subscribe to a group in a forum, if you have access to multiple groups and don't want to subscribe to everything.

Another point to make is that a lot of forumNG functionality is implemented using the 'ForumNG feature' sub-plugin type. By default there is a lot of functionality, and if you don't need it all, you could remove some sub-plugins. (Some of the sub-plugins are quite specific to how the OU does things. We recognise that.)

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Moodle Forums......

by Mark Andrews -

Hi all,

 

Some interesting comments in here; regarding forumNG, advanced forums, various functionalities, accessibility and usability etc…. All of which bring me back to my original question: 

'is there a tangible development plan for the moodle forums?'

Based on the discussion it seems not. But there does seem to be people with ideas, and some with solutions.

So I guess the next question is:

How to move this forward? - should we be looking to simply update the current forum tool with the advancements in forumNG, Advanced forums and other developments or look to build a new tool that takes these factors into account plus adds some best practice functionalities from forum(esq) tools from the web.

Thoughts, ideas?

Cheers

Mark

 PS. We're meeting with Catalyst IT later this week to discuss the technicalities of the 'reading list' functionality, perhaps when we have a technical design we can post here for comment/discussion.

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In reply to Mark Andrews

Re: Moodle Forums......

by Mark Andrews -

Hello,

Earlier in this thread I outlined some bookmarking forum post functionality that we we're planning on having developed. To close the loop I thought I would post an update.

We now have the first iteration of this tool live for our participants initial indications seem to show it's going to be useful. I'd be keen to hear if others would find this useful, or how it could be further development enhanced - would it even be useful for core inclusion?

Regards

Mark

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In reply to Mark Andrews

Re: Moodle Forums......

by Derek Chirnside -

The bookmarks Mark?  Did they ever get finished?  Are they available as a plugin?

-Derek

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In reply to Derek Chirnside

Re: Moodle Forums......

by Mark Andrews -

Hi Derek,

Yes it did - hopefully the demo video higher up in the thread shows it in action. We were really quite pleased with how it works.

I understand the development was a local plugin but did require an additional line into core so I guess would not be a neat plugin. However, my recollection was that if forums implemented renderers then it would be possible to make it a 'clean' plugin.

We did discuss at the time submitting it to core, but, unfortunately i'm not sure if that happened. I've left that role so doubt if I would be able push it any further forward.

However, if it's felt that this could make contact and see if there would be the possibility of this.

Apologizes for my slightly unclear comment.


Best

Mark

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