flagging forum messages

flagging forum messages

by Przemyslaw Stencel -
Number of replies: 6

An idea that occurred to me when I was using busy courses:

The problem: in courses where many forum messages are generated, I often find that when I log into the course to see what's new, I find so many new messages that I barely find the time to read them, not to mention replying to some of them.

The solution: Make it possible to 'flag' messages. This could be used as a way to mark messages which I want to reply to later. Flagged messages could be accessed via the "Forums" page.

I'm posting it here rather than in the bug tracker, because here we can discuss it first. Once there are some conclusions, I will file a feature request (or not, if it turns out to be useless smile).

What do you all think?

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In reply to Przemyslaw Stencel

Re: flagging forum messages

by Hans de Zwart -

This 'flagging' is exactly what I do now with my e-mail client (The Bat!) for the incredible amount of forum posts that I (and you probably too) receive from moodle.org.

My e-mail client is very well setup for this and using my client is very much my preferred way of reading the messages and when I want to reply I just click inside the e-mail to answer.

Being that most e-mail clients will probably be very good at this (not for the Hotmailing students maybe) I am not sure that this is a necessary feature, especially in the light of recent usability discussions elsewhere in these forums.

Anyway that is just my opinion and there might be many people out there who do like to use the recent activities as an entrance point for reading the forum discussions.

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In reply to Hans de Zwart

Re: flagging forum messages

by Martin Dougiamas -
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Exactly right - Mozilla Mail is my main interface to the Moodle forums.
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In reply to Martin Dougiamas

Re: flagging forum messages

by Przemyslaw Stencel -
That's right, but this solution only works for those who use email clients to keep up with discussions. But, as Hans noted, there might be many people out there who do like to use the recent activities as an entrance point for reading the forum discussions. Myself, I only subscribe to a few most important forums in the courses I teach, and I keep up to date with the other forums using the Recent Activity. And it's not only me - in the course I'm running now, a majority of people seemed to prefer not working with forum subscriptions.
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In reply to Przemyslaw Stencel

Re: flagging forum messages

by Hans de Zwart -

So how do you remember which messages you have and have not read? If you are going to do flagging you might as well keep some read/unread variable or wouldn't that suit your needs?

By the way: some time ago I asked in these forums whether it wouldn't be a good idea to subscribe to discussion rather then to forums. Martin answered that from a constructivist standpoint he would prefer me to receive as much e-mail as possible. I agreed with him and since have subscribed myself to nearly all Moodle forums.
In my teaching I rarely give my (secondary) students a choice of subscription. Usually I just force it.

As soon as pressed 'Save Changes' I saw why you may prefer to do it this way and not through e-mail: the thread. Yes, it is a nice way to look at the messages.

So how would we implement your suggested changes without making things more complicated?

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In reply to Martin Dougiamas

Re: flagging forum messages

by Peter Sereinigg -

I am "flagging" my mails with outlook mail 2003, possible in colors with time schedules ...
works perfect

but a easys way to mark this in a forum makes this usable for people who dont use a specialised client, just webmail ...

I am shure, that increasing possibilities of the forum as a central communication point in a course would be a fantastic way.

I use moodle since one year, and every day I find new possibilities how features of moodle can be used else!
Most of my ideas and feedbacks I am posting in the german forum (time and some problems with my english), but I hope I can change this ...
In increasing possibilities of the forum, I would like to spend ideas and I am shure that with end of summer also with development capacities (well trained student groups of my university will do this in their lessons...)

Martin, that what you have done and reached with moodle is great - thanks for your persitend going the moodle way!

Peter

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