I am interested in setting up dialogues between students and myself and they are to be private. I see that the forum set up could work. Students write, I respond but students cannot see conversations that are not their own. It would be like having organized e-mail and strictly run through Moodle..
Yes?
Hi Steve,
For dialogues with students, there is a Dialogue plugin that gives exactly your desired capability. What you mention doing with the Forum, can be done, but you really have to be careful with the settings to ensure privacy. The privacy is automatic with the Dialogue plugin. It will also let you send a dialogue message to everyone at one time, and when they reply, it only goes to you.
I used to keep mine installed only on the front page of Moodle, with it set to where the only addressee students could see to send to was a teacher, so they could not use it to message their friends.
Hi Steve,
Another option would be to set your forum to separate groups mode then auto-create Groups with one student in each group.
Interesting concept. I have my sysop working to install the Dialogue Plugin.
This use of the forum may be seen as a kluge to some but I am intrigued to twerk around the standards for the invention of it all. Just learning "Auto Create" may justify the effort.
Helen, I saw Ryan demonstrate this approach at this year's MountainMoot. I thought that it was a very interesting approach to having individual discussions with students. I learned about "auto-create" groups too, a part of Moodle that I had not explored yet.
I just created the forum for this and launched it. It seems to be working. The catch is to set "Auto create based on" to "Members per group" and "Group/member count" gets set to 1.
It creates GroupA, GroupB groupC etc but then I went in and renamed the groups to the names of the students. Place a hyphen in front of each name and they gather together in the list of groups very nicely. I will post my results in a few days.
It is not too difficult to set up once you understand the difference between Groups and Grouping. ( :
(Really, could it not have been groups and sub-groups?)