Course activity to facilitate this unusual forum-like use case

Course activity to facilitate this unusual forum-like use case

by Vedant Nayar -
Number of replies: 11
Hi all,

We're building a course where our use case is super specific, and we're stumped on what plugin/activity we could use to make it work.

Within our course, there will be a certain number of people we identify as experts (this can be via a new role or they can be added as facilitators). Regular learners can enter an "Ask the Expert" style section on the course and ask a question. Any expert is able to view the question and reply to it. Learners cannot see each others' questions, or answers to other questions; only their own threads.

In other words, our use case is:
  • Students can submit a question/create a thread
  • Questions/Threads are visible to all experts but not to other students
  • Experts can reply to the question/thread
Could we use the existing forum activity for this? We've looked into it and it doesn't seem to support anything this specific, but maybe we're overlooking something? Or is there another existing plugin/activity that would help us with this?

Thanks!
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In reply to Vedant Nayar

Re: Course activity to facilitate this unusual forum-like use case

by Randy Thornton -
Picture of Documentation writers

Vedant,

Using Forum you can do this if you set it to use Separate Groups, then create a group for each student and add all the Experts to each student group. Then the experts can see all the student posts but the students can not see each others. That's a lot of work to set up but it will work. (You can use the Upload user tool to create and manage such groups.

Have you looked in the plugins database for something like this? I would think that someone may have a plugin to do this sort of activity.

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In reply to Randy Thornton

Re: Course activity to facilitate this unusual forum-like use case

by Vedant Nayar -
Hi Randy,

Creating the individual groups might be a last resort, but considering we'd likely have students continually added to the course over time this isn't a feasible long term solution.

I haven't taken a look at the plugins database simply because I have no idea where to start looking or what search terms to use. I did keep using google searches in the hope that it would return relevant plugins. Any advice on that front would be appreciated.
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In reply to Vedant Nayar

Course activity to facilitate this unusual forum-like use case

by Stefan Scholz -
Picture of Plugin developers
Use the database activity. The trick is to enable approval for entries, but never approve entries, because not approved entries are invisible for other students. Your experts could then use the comments feature to „answer”.

If you need more detailed instructions or a proof of concept, let me know!

Hope this helps!
Stefan
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In reply to Stefan Scholz

Re: Course activity to facilitate this unusual forum-like use case

by Randy Thornton -
Picture of Documentation writers
Ah, also you could do something similar with Glossary: just never approve the entries but allow comments by teachers.

Glossary does not have the ability to understand Groups. But if your Experts are all in the teacher role or have the relevant permissions, it would work... As long as they don't approve entries, which if they do, will be viewable by all the students.

The advantage of Database for this is you can create the data structure you want, if you need to do that. The advantage of using Glossary is you can just use one of the predefined formats and structures it has already.
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In reply to Stefan Scholz

Re: Course activity to facilitate this unusual forum-like use case

by Vedant Nayar -
Hi Stefan & Randy,

I need to check that it is acceptable from a user experience standpoint, since the text in the plugin might be confusing, but I'm happy to report that functionally it meets our needs. Thanks a bunch!
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In reply to Vedant Nayar

Re: Course activity to facilitate this unusual forum-like use case

by Vedant Nayar -
For posterity: Rather than compromising on the user experience we are going to compromise on the "users can't see each other's posts" part and just use a forum (with students having replies disabled). Thanks to everyone for helping!
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In reply to Vedant Nayar

Re: Course activity to facilitate this unusual forum-like use case

by Stefan Scholz -
Picture of Plugin developers
Hi Vedant,

big thumbs up from my side for posting what you ended up doing!

All the best
Stefan
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In reply to Vedant Nayar

Re: Course activity to facilitate this unusual forum-like use case

by Joost Elshoff -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers
The community plugin Dialogue may also be of interest: https://moodle.org/plugins/mod_dialogue
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In reply to Joost Elshoff

Re: Course activity to facilitate this unusual forum-like use case

by Vedant Nayar -
Hi Joost,

Thank you for your suggestion. I'll definitely keep this in mind because we might need this plugin for another project we're working on. Unfortunately for this one, it doesn't quite meet the use case because a student would need to pick out an expert to ask their question to rather than posting as an open question (if that makes sense). Cheers!
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In reply to Joost Elshoff

Re: Course activity to facilitate this unusual forum-like use case

by Randy Thornton -
Picture of Documentation writers
There is also the Journal plugin as well: https://docs.moodle.org/400/en/Journal_module. I haven't used it recently, but it still looks maintained and has been around a long time. AL Rachels also maintains the Diary module which is similar but with more featurs: https://moodle.org/plugins/mod_diary
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In reply to Randy Thornton

Re: Course activity to facilitate this unusual forum-like use case

by Vedant Nayar -
Unfortunately these still fall in the zone of accomplishing the task but confusing our learners along the way. I think we're going to stick with the forum compromise, but it's good to know that these exist for future reference. Thanks!
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