Forum Subscribe to only responding students

Forum Subscribe to only responding students

by Paul Baumeister -
Number of replies: 4

I am looking for a plugin or fix for creating another option in the forums that make it much more convenient for the instructors in reference to the subscriptions.

Most of our instructors do not want to subscribe to all of the posts and get 100 posts/emails per week from students.

But what they would love is to be subscribed in the sense that only email copies of the discussion is sent via email when a student responds to the instructor. In other words, The instructor would receive emails notifying that someone responded to their post. Otherwise he/she would not receive any emails about any other post unless it was a post in response to the instructor's post.

This makes it easier for the instructor to know to post quicker, which would help the dialogue immensely.

Is this a possibility now? If there is no setting or plugin for this, can this be created?

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In reply to Paul Baumeister

Re: Forum Subscribe to only responding students

by Andrew Lyons -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers

Hi Paul,

As it happens, this is already available in core and has been since Moodle 2.7 (if my memory serves).

If your instructors unsubscribe from the forum, they can still be subscribed to an individual discussion within it.

They will be automatically subscribed to any discussion that they post in and can choose to subscribe to, or unsubscribe from any discussion with or without posting.

This feature is available to all users.

Hope this helps,

Andrew

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In reply to Andrew Lyons

Re: Forum Subscribe to only responding students

by Paul Baumeister -

Yes. But what I am referring is different. I would like any post from the instructor that gets a reply, that the instructor would be sent an email with the reply. So it would not be the whole discussion. He would not receive emails from other students replying to students within the discussion. It would be like this:


John Doe: "I think that it should be......"

   - Instructor: "Yes, but if you...."

       - John Doe: "That's what I thought..."  ---Instructor gets an email copy since he responded to instructor

   - Mary J: "I am not sure if it should be..." ---Instructor does NOT get an email since she responded to John and not instructor


The advantage of the this is that the instructor does not get 100's of emails of all discussions, but if someone does respond to him, he does not miss the response. Obviously, the instructor will have to log into the class daily and respond to student's initial posts, but this helps a tremendously in making sure that the dialogue is quicker in replies and that the student definitely gets answered and instead of the student's conversation being buried in a 100  posts.

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In reply to Paul Baumeister

Re: Forum Subscribe to only responding students

by Just H -

Have instructors change their email settings to digest.

The way you want it isn't achievable as far as I'm aware and I doubt anyone would work on it. If they only get replies to their own posts they could be missing huge chunks of a conversation that may go off on a tangent and mislead students involved in it.

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In reply to Just H

Re: Forum Subscribe to only responding students

by Paul Baumeister -

Yes. It would not replace the instructor from viewing the whole conversation, but it would help in expediting the reply by the instructor and it would help so that the conversation is not lost in the mix. We have 25 students often in our classes, so it can easily get buried. It would just enhance the experience all around for everyone.

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