Dom, don't know about messaging. On my Moodle, I disable messaging completely.
For forums, if you have groups set up, just don't post the topic to the group that you don't want to involve.
I use groups for forum discussions, and moodle does a good job keep discussions separated.
How many groups do you typically have in a course?
Hi Rick,
Not sure what you meant 100% Rick, apologies. You suggest not posting the topic, but I want forums removed or not visible or disabled all together.
The idea is I am going to have three groups, that are completely separate, and invisible to each other and make sure that TWO of them have them not be allowed to use / see / access forums in any way - and also not use messaging. Its part of a research pilot that evaluates the role of social learning)
I'm not sure how to do this. Is there a sort of permissions approach perhaps that would do this on a group level basis?
DOes that help?
Dom, consider exploring groups and forums in Moodle. Set up your three groups. Then create a forum. In the settings you will see a Group mode setting, I make this be "separate groups." Then add a topic to this new forum. This is where you also have some control of which groups will see this topic. When I do this, the two other groups do not see what is being posted in the first group.
There are a lot of group settings to work with, but you might be able to do what you want to do.
Again, messaging is something else. I don't use messaging at all. I teach at the university level and students have many other ways to message each other.
Hi Rick
Sorry for the delay, I am no longer getting notifications from Moodle on replies. Very frustrating. I will have to start checking daily until I know why.
In the meantime, I'm still struggling Im afraid. I have three courses (which are to be enrolled into meta courses) and I need to disable ONLY forum access in two of the three.
I cant use courses for various reasons (long story!)
Any suggestions, very gratefully received - and again I need to stress my thanks for your ongoing expert help!
D
Dom, I don't know. Maybe your cron is not running? Have you tried manually running cron?
If there is a course specifically for the students you don't want to access forums, why don't you just not put forums in the course? Maybe I'm not understanding what you're doing. I don't understand the can't use courses comment.
If they all do all three, the enrollment is irrelevant for Rick's suggestion--in each relevant course, create groups: those who can see the forums and those who can't. Go to the forum settings and restrict access (hide) from group that is not allowed to participate. This should be possible in 2.7 and is definitely possible in 3.x. I'm pretty sure it worked in 2.8 but I don't remember 2.5 well enough...since it is right in between...maybe?
As for disabling IM...maybe you just create a second Student role (this would be a site admin thing) and restrict permissions to use IM...you could also block forum use as well, Then enroll that block of people into Student 2 instead of default student. I don't know how your meta is set up...that might not help if the meta is all of them...If you go for the second student role, you can also disable permissions in category areas.