Using groups in forums (Moodle 3.8.3)

Using groups in forums (Moodle 3.8.3)

by Gyandev McCord -
Number of replies: 5

I'd like to use the Groups feature for team discussions. (In the past, I've used separate, identical forums, but many students and small teams, that gets clunky.) Every tutorial I've found makes it out to be super-simple: define your groups and groupings, add your forum and choose the Group mode and Grouping in the forum settings, and you're good to go. Indeed, a friend who uses Moodle Cloud does exactly that, and it works like a charm for her. But so far for me in "regular" Moodle when working with a standard forum for general use:

  • If I choose "separate groups" in the forum setting, students see only their own group's discussion (that's good), but they do not see a Reply link so they cannot participate in discussion (not good). All they see is a Permalink link.
  • If I choose "visible groups," students can see and reply to every post in every group's discussion (all posts from all groups are visible at once, regardless of which group the student chose in the dropdown menu), which is not what I want at all. In fact, I cannot imagine anyone wanting that.
Any thoughts as to what I am missing or doing wrong? Thank you.
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In reply to Gyandev McCord

Re: Using groups in forums (Moodle 3.8.3)

by Mary Cooch -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers Picture of Translators
Hello there. Please test these steps and see if they work for you:
  1. In your course settings, make sure you have it set to Groups (let's say separate) You don't have to 'force' it unless you want to. You probably don't need groupings.
  2. Make sure you have created groups and added students to the groups.
  3. In your forum, set the forum to Separate groups.
  4. As a teacher, if you want students to be able to answer your posts (rather than just reading them and seeing the permalink) then you must make sure you tick the "post a copy to all groups" box underneath the post. This will then duplicate your post so that it will display a separate copy for each group, to which they can reply. The documentation Using Forum has a section on using groups with forums which might be useful to you.


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In reply to Mary Cooch

Re: Using groups in forums (Moodle 3.8.3)

by Gyandev McCord -
You are awesome, Mary! Thank you so much. I had already covered your steps 1–3, but never would I have thought to pay any attention to that checkbox you mentioned in step 4. Even the info in the nearby question mark doesn't suggest that would be my solution.

With that "little" addition, both "separate groups" and "visible groups" now work as expected. And it doesn't seem to matter what the course settings are ("separate groups" or "visible groups"); so long as I don't force anything in course settings, the individual forums' settings seem to carry the day.

When you suggest in step 1 that I won't need "groupings," I assume you're talking about in the course settings, because it seems I'll need to work with groupings settings in the individual forums if I want to use different groupings in the course. Please correct me if I'm wrong about that.

Now I just wish that groups would work with single simple discussions …

Thanks again.
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In reply to Gyandev McCord

Re: Using groups in forums (Moodle 3.8.3)

by Mary Cooch -
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Glad it worked! Regarding "groupings", what do you want to do with your groupings that you cannot do simply by using groups?
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In reply to Mary Cooch

Re: Using groups in forums (Moodle 3.8.3)

by Joost Elshoff -
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Hi Gyandev and Mary,

I'd recommend adding the groups to groupings for 'future-proofing' your course. You will eventually decide your students will do product work in another group composition than the ones used for the forums (Cohort A consists of Class 1, 2, and 3; in Class 1 we have 5 project groups). In that case you only want to see the project groups in the assignment and linked tasks, and not the Class groups.

So, adding the groups to a grouping may not sound as useful at the beginning, but as your experience as a Moodler increases, you'll see the benefit of having used the groupings...
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In reply to Joost Elshoff

Re: Using groups in forums (Moodle 3.8.3)

by Gyandev McCord -
Thanks for your thoughts, Joost.

As we move through the course, I regularly change the composition of the groups, as I want students to have the experience of working with different teammates. (They like it, too.) Groupings seemed to me to be the robust way to do that. I could instead simply switch people in and out of their initial groups, but there could be problems when we're in Unit 6, say, and a student wants to go back to a Unit 4 forum and say something: Her Unit 4 teammates might now be different, as might the entire discussion!
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