Looking behind all the discussions I had over the last months with clients one issue was mentioned very often: activity stream.
Driven by other tools like (Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Microsoft Team, Totara Social) people are asking for activity streams as key feature for social activitiy in a platform. I thought a lot about the idea and why it could make sense in a LMS.
Corporate learning is more and more defined by an 70:20:10 concept. 70 % is learning on the job while being confronted with new requirements, making new experience, trial and error. 20% of learning is based on discussion with colleagues and managers, 10 % are formal courses organized by HR departments. A Learning Platform should support all types of learning at an institution. Lets think how Moodle can support this in the best way.
Activity streams comes in focus when people are using Facebook, Twitter, Slack Micosoft Team. The common concept is that there is one location where all activities that happens are integrated and I can directly react. Some clients reported that using such tools activated a lot of people that were inactive in blog, forum or chat tools.
In formal learning concept that has pros and cons:
- pro:
better overview than only reading the number of new activities in dashboard per forum.
easier reaction in course discussion - con:
formal learning needs concentration on a topic and it makes sense to go to the topic related course first.
most learning will use learning paths
- pro:
getting a quick overview about a lot of topics I'm subscribed to
reaction with a few sentences should be easy
its not required to be involved in all activities liek a course
getting impulses for daily work are pushed in a activity stream - con:
If activity stream grows I will see only the lastest topics.
I think we should discuss the Activity Stream idea also here.
Is this essentially a re-positioning of Forums as persistent chat/discussion channels?
Hi Ray
all this has to be discussed. What do you think?
This could include:
- forum posts
- new activities and resssources that are available (incl. by restrictions)
- reminder for scheduled activities (x days in advance)
- comments
- ..
Ralf
it would be wonderful to see something like this in moodle, something like a timeline with interactions, maybe an evolution of myoverview block?
there is a plugin https://moodle.org/plugins/format_socialwall that walks accordingly.
but it may be interesting for moodle as a whole
We have a new course format that is somewhat based on a social concept. We have a purpose in mind. We are a K-12 school district and we need to provide access to parents. But we don't want parents poking around in the learning material.
So we are brainstorming some ideas on how to create a course format which has a forward facing homepage which would be a discussion forum in a tab. The forum tab would be accessible by parents and students and be a place for the teacher to make their announcements. The next tab over would contain the learning material. It would be based on the topic format and work just like this. The learning tab would only be accessible by students and teachers.
Sounds like a Social format variant.
How would you prevent direct URL access to resources? IIRC if you used the Social activities block that would be possible even if you used permissions to hide the block.