I'm not really sold on the idea (yet).
I can see it would be good to have that information, but there are big problems with the accuracy of it, in that Moodle can never really know what is being read.
What if someone just looks briefly at a discussion page, or does a search that find those posts? Should EVERY post on that page be incremented by one?
If half the class look at a particular discussion two or more times, then the total number of views might be equal to the number of people in the class (yet only half might have seen it). A teacher might look at the numbers and think everyone's read it.
Perhaps having misleading information around like this is worse than no information.
If this feature were to be implemented, it might be better to store a simple true/false flag for each post, for each student, which gets set true if the student has had that post on the screen at some time (either by web or email). This would also one way of solving
bug 141 (display of read/unread postings).
One problem even with this approach is a blowout in the amount of data being stored and then later processed. Another problem is that a student who subscribes to all the forums will automatically be seen as a perfect student, even if they haven't read a single thing.
It's a complex problem that I think is without a satisfactory solution.
The lure of trying to build a system that does your assessment work for you is a bit like the lure of the Sirens.
I think a better approach to evaluate a student's involvement is to look at the 'Complete Report' for a student and evaluate what they've been
writing (rather than what they might or might not have been
reading).
