I have been having a problem in which I post a new discussion topic in a forum. However, my students keep replying to a previous discussion topic in the same forum. For example, let's say I have a forum with two topics in it, topic 1 and topic 2. I want to close topic 1 only so the students can only respond to topic 2 in my forum. Therefore, is there a way to...
D T, check out this: https://docs.moodle.org/32/en/Using_Forum#Locking_a_discussion
This functionality is available (sort of), but only in Moodle 3.2. You may be able to get this to work for you. I don't believe a teacher can go in an 'lock a discussion' but they can specify a period of inactivity after which it is locked.
The tracker items are here: https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-12944 Make sure you vote if you are interested.
-Derek
Moodle's discussion features seems to work more at the Forum level than at the "topic" level. This includes "locking" forums and moving forums. Someday I plan to create a "feature" request to suggest some changes. So as far as I know, there is no way to lock a topic.
Out of curiosity, do you know any LMS that implements a Forum:Topic structure that allows individual topics within a forum to be locked?
No, I only want this feature because my students cannot follow directions sometimes. If they would pay closer attention I would not have them posting stuff in the wrong discussion leading to serious confusion.
DT and Rick.
I was completely wrong in my post. It does not work as I expected. (Rick is right, it only works at the forum level)
DT: you are back to having one forum per question maybe? Or using a different type of forum? https://docs.moodle.org/32/en/Forum_activity
The implementation is not finished: https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-12944
-Derek
I can appreciate what you are trying to do. The main "resource" is the forum. This is where you control what goes on. Topics themselves are not controllable. If you want some discussion to happen under different controls, you need to create a forum for each.
What I do is to use a time limit to control discussions. I do not lock my forums because I actually don't mind students making comments (even on older discussions) at any point in the course. But discussions do have a due date. I use the forum's due date to control this. For any posts that occur after the due date, I am not able to "rate" them. This is how I know they are late.
I tend to have one forum per each week's chapter. Then within the forum, I create 6 to 8 topics and let students pick which ones they want to participate in.
I also use a combination of technical and pedagogical measures, as Rick does, to be sure participants know when a discussion is closed. Besides Rick's technical tipps, we use in one of our courses, which is based mainly on forum discussions, the summary approach. When the forum is due date, we - the trainers- or one student is responsible of writing a summary of all the threads of the forum, which are related, then, as Rick indicated, we create a forum for each topic.
Moodle's discussion features seems to work more at the Forum level than at the "topic" level. This includes "locking" forums and moving forums.
Out of curiosity, do you know any LMS that implements a Forum:Topic structure that allows individual topics within a forum to be locked?
Moodle (As covered in previous posts, just time based at the moment from the looks of things.)
For example, in the forums here it's set for 12 months by the looks of it as per this example: https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=325574.
Re moving discussions that's been available for a while (as in, mods here move posts tp the correct forum and split discussions too): https://docs.moodle.org/32/en/Using_Forum#Moving_a_discussion.
Or am I missing something?
It would be very useful to be able to manually lock a discussion thread too.
Totally agree; I would have thought that a higher priority than time based.
OK then, everyone in favour make sure you vote and or comment on https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-12944.
A fix to the Sub-Task (1) to achieve Sub-Task (2) there will be easy. If you know how.
-Derek