Increasing student participation in the News forums

Increasing student participation in the News forums

by Rob Farrell -
Number of replies: 8

Hi All,


I am trying to increase my students participation on the Moodle news forums and create a weekly management report.


Does Moodle have reports for the news forums or can anyone recommend how you monitor/report on forum activity.


Thanks

Rob

(Edited by Mary Cooch - original submission Tuesday, 19 January 2016, 11:13 AM)

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In reply to Rob Farrell

Re: News Forums use

by Mary Cooch (personal account) -
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Do you mean increasing your students viewing the News forum? Because by default they can't post to a News forum.

In reply to Mary Cooch (personal account)

Re: News Forums use

by Rob Farrell -

Hi Mary,


Yes, I mean students reading and responding to posts. I have set the forums to be an open discussion, students can add posts, respond to each other and I can post.


The key thing I'm looking of is how best to report their participation. I can use the report logs and create a pivot table to manipulate the info. It becomes time consuming as I'm managing cirac 900 students across 15 programmes. The simplest metric Im reporting is % of group that made some action in the past week (reading, posting, responding etc)


Thanks


Rob

In reply to Rob Farrell

Re: Increasing student participation in the News Forums

by Mary Cooch (personal account) -
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Thanks for the clarification smile I'm intrigued as to why you changed the permissions on a News forum as opposed to using one of the regular forum types but I appreciate that doesn't help with your question. I've changed the subject title to see if it will attract more takers.

In reply to Mary Cooch (personal account)

Monitoring students reading messages in a news forum

by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
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I understand the question as how to _monitor_ students reading messages in a news forum.

The answer is you can't! The posts in a news forum are sent as e-mails. The might be reading them in their own mail readers.
In reply to Visvanath Ratnaweera

Re: Monitoring students reading messages in a news forum

by Rob Farrell -

Visvanath,


Thanks but I respectfully disagree, I have generated log reports showing the following activity:

  • Discussion created
  • Discussion reviewed
  • Post created
  • Some content has been posted

I'm looking for a quick/efficient way of reporting.


I may have called the Forum a 'News Forum' by mistake as multi-directional communication is allowed in the forum between me to students , students to me and student to students. 

I'm not too concerned with monitor email views/open rates, I'm more interested with engagement in the forums themselves.


Thanks


Rob

In reply to Rob Farrell

Re: Monitoring students reading messages in a news forum

by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Translators
Hi

Reading again, I realize that your sentence "I mean students reading and responding to posts." misled me. Your interest is on _responding_ to running discussions and _initiating_ new discussions. They are different from _reading_. (Hopefully they read before responding. ;)

There are too many reporting methods in Moodle. Did you scan https://docs.moodle.org/en/Category:Report ?
In reply to Mary Cooch (personal account)

Re: Increasing student participation in the News Forums

by Rob Farrell -

Thanks Mary,


I think we do use discussion forums on Moodle but the common office term we use is news forum so that can cause confusion.


Regards reporting, I created a template management report using exported data from the logs and manipulated it in a pivot table so that looks to be closer to my solution. Unfortunately it is labour intensive unless I find an option to generate a report automatically,


Rob


In reply to Rob Farrell

Re: News Forums use

by Kim Salinas -

Hi Rob, have you considered grading the forum? This would assign them the points right on the post. If you have a discussion requirement of 2 posts worth 10 points, you could set it to Sum of grades with the maximum being 10 points, and assign up to 5 points per post.

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