Say you have 20 groups in one course, and you wish to post a message to 8 groups. Can you do this with a forum? I can only seem to find the option to post to one group or all groups...
Hi Richard,
I'm afraid that this is currently not possible unless you are only in these eight groups.
Andrew
An interesting question, and so far a solution saying "not possible."
Correct, not possible. However, creating a new post for 8 groups using copy/paste is an alternative. Sure, takes a little while. But I could do this in less than 2 minutes. I know this because each week I create around 8 posts by copying from an old course and pasting into the new.
Thanks for the answers.
Rick, the 'multiple' post solution is what teachers do. But... we have courses with 20 groups and a lot is being posted. The forums look horrible now, with many of the same topics in the forum. It's a mess really....
So I posted a tracker as an improvement. Make it possible to select multiple groups
Please vote!
Yep, Richard, I think that I know what you mean.
The most groups that I have ever dealt with were 6. But even with six groups, I always gave all six groups the same discussion topics. Moodle's "Post a copy to all groups" made this easy.
You have made me wonder what I would do if I wanted 6 groups, but wanted to give two different sets of topics, dividing the group of six into two groups of three. I have never faced this need, but I might make two major groups in Moodle containing 3 sub-groups, and then have two forums that are for each of the two major groups.
Well yes, this gets complex. And how about if you wanted to have 6 completely different topics for each of the 20 groups? This would get really complex, but doable, but also would look pretty messy as viewed by the instructor.
In general, I view discussions as "open-ended." I never know what to expect from students, but I always read these and grade them for "quality" thoughts. And I do like having smaller groups, like 15 students or so, involved as a smaller group for discussions. In my one course this past summer, I had 80 students, and I didn't want all 80 students grouped together for discussions. However, I didn't mind provided all six groups the same selection of discussion topics.
It is good that you created a feature request. Let's see where this goes. But, how would you actually implement this? I didn't understand what you intend the instructor to see? Would you see adding another area, maybe under "Post a copy to all groups" that would have 20 check boxes showing the names of all of your 20 groups, that might go "grey" when "Post a copy to all groups" is checked? Or a drop down? Might this be what you are thinking?
Or are you suggesting that the current "Group" dropdown simply provide for multiple selections? (Somehow, I am not sure if I have seen a dropdown with multiple selections provided by html. Have you?)
I am also not sure what you mean by "looks horrible." Do you mean when creating, or do you mean when grading?
Thanks for your reply Rick,
Or are you suggesting that the current "Group" dropdown simply provide for multiple selections? (Somehow, I am not sure if I have seen a dropdown with multiple selections provided by html. Have you?)
I guess a different selection method is needed then. Like for example when you add users to a group, you are able to select multiple users.
I am also not sure what you mean by "looks horrible." Do you mean when creating, or do you mean when grading?
As a teacher you will see all topics in the forum. If you post the same topic 10 times, you will see it 10 times. If you do this a couple of times, you will see many duplicate topics. When students start replying on them, they will move to the top. At one point you will see many, many topics and many, many topics will have the exact same name.
That's what I mean with messy
I thought that this (see all topics in a forum) is what you might mean gets messy. In my course, when I have 6 groups and 8 topics, I see 48 forum discussions going on. However, this is what is really happing, there really are 48 different discussions, and each discussion might be discussing different perspectives. Right now, I do have a way to say "Show me only group X."
So what we have are two opposing problems. If you want to have smaller discussion groups that make students discussions more focused, then you end up with the instructor needing to participate in more discussion topics and grade. If you put students into larger groups, discussion quality can go down, but grading becomes easier.
I don't see any good way to resolve these opposing issues.
But the same issues are there even in physical course discussions. If a large lecture (let's say 300) has smaller discussion groups (let's say 20), then what does the instructor do? Does the instructor visit each break-out discussion group?
For picking which group gets which topics, I did come across one method that could work. This is for a standalone product (Tableau). I am not sure if this is easy to do in html.
