How do I stop students from posting to a forum?

How do I stop students from posting to a forum?

by Elaine Walsh -
Number of replies: 21

Hi,

For the past few years I have been managing collaborate assessment techniques using forums in Moodle for distance education students. One technique is to create debates around different topics. We recently upgraded to Moodle Version 1.8.

In the settings I have set up seperate groups (not forced). I have the individual forums set to standard forum for general use and seperate. Once the debating period of the year has ended I normally edit the forum and set the Forum type to No discussions no replies. I have been doing this for the past three years. However, I now can not do this.

Does anyone know how to stop students from posting to the forums?

Thanks,

Elaine

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In reply to Elaine Walsh

Re: How do I stop students from posting to a forum?

by Steve Hyndman -

I've done (still do) the same type thing with forums. In 1.6 and earlier it's pretty easy...you can do what you want from a simple dropdown. In 1.8, not so simple...you need to edit the forum, click on the "Roles" tab, click on "override roles", click on "student", then look through the multitude of settings and change the appropriate ones from "inherit" to "prevent".

And that's without using groups...with groups I'm just guessing that will work. 

Good luck.

Steve 

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In reply to Steve Hyndman

Re: How do I stop students from posting to a forum?

by Elaine Walsh -

Hi Steve,

Thank you for your reply.

I think you need to be an administrator to do this? I don't have the "override roles" option as I am in as a teacher/facilitator. I've spoken to our people with admin rights, within our university, but they have told me that "override roles" doesn't work.

Elaine

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In reply to Elaine Walsh

Re: How do I stop students from posting to a forum?

by Steve Hyndman -

I just use a test 1.8 site and I am an admin, so that may be true. If it is, that's unfortunate.

Of course, the entire roles system is so complicated, I don't think anyone really understands them...just look at this discussion in the "developers" forum for an example of that:

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=84472

Best of luck.

Steve

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In reply to Steve Hyndman

Re: How do I stop students from posting to a forum?

by Elaine Walsh -

Thank you Steve,

It is very complicated but I will see what I can figure out.

Elaine

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In reply to Elaine Walsh

Re: How do I stop students from posting to a forum?

by Helen Foster -
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Hi Elaine,

You may want to ask your admin to enable teachers to set role overrides (as described in the one of the Roles FAQ documentation) anyway, as overrides can open up a lot of additional functionality in other activities as well as in forums.
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In reply to Helen Foster

Re: How do I stop students from posting to a forum?

by Elaine Walsh -

Hi Helen,

Our admin have told me that the overrides function doesn't work so I'm still not able to do this.

Elaine

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In reply to Elaine Walsh

Re: How do I stop students from posting to a forum?

by Helen Foster -
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Elaine, that's a shame. Until your admin has chance to fix the problem, I guess you're left with assigning all students the role of guest in the forum, as Paul suggested. You can assign all students in one go by holding down the Apple or Ctrl key whilst clicking on their names.
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In reply to Elaine Walsh

Vote! How do I stop students from posting to a forum?

by A. T. Wyatt -
I have located a feature request that sounds quite similar to this in the tracker. Perhaps if we can encourage some voting activity, we can renew interest in this feature!

http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-999

To vote, you will need a separate log in for the tracker. I have already recorded my vote.

atw
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In reply to A. T. Wyatt

Re: Vote! How do I stop students from posting to a forum?

by Elaine Walsh -

Thanks atw.

I have voted (I think) so hopefully this feature will come back into Moodle.

Elaine

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In reply to A. T. Wyatt

Re: Vote! How do I stop students from posting to a forum?

by D.I. von Briesen -
AT- this feature request doesn't seem to jive with what we are talking about here- is the link still correct? What I saw related to timing out a post.

d.i.

(thanks for the roles solution- pretty dang cumbersome compared to the good 'ol dropdown. Seems like a pretty obvious must-have...)
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In reply to D.I. von Briesen

Re: Vote! How do I stop students from posting to a forum?

by A. T. Wyatt -
Could be that you are right! It was similar, but maybe not similar enough.

If you would like to file a new issue, let us know and we will come vote for it. Or maybe you can find an issue that is more precisely the problem we are discussing and let us know the number. *I* would certainly like to use a forum lock feature!

atw
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In reply to A. T. Wyatt

Re: Vote! How do I stop students from posting to a forum?

by Daniel Etra -
We have a similar issue where we have created a community course that is more of a general conversation space for our virtual community. Because we want everyone to be able to contribute and co-create this course, we have everyone with "teacher" permissions.

We have one forum in particular that is an announcements forum, to which everyone is subscribed, and to which anyone can create a new discussion. But what happens is that people end up starting conversation in the announcements forum, which get broadcast to everyone.

We would love a way to set a forum as "no discussions, no replies." Or, we'd love to see a news module that is just one-way broadcast communication to subscribers.
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In reply to A. T. Wyatt

Re: Vote! How do I stop students from posting to a forum?

by Teresa Gibbison -
Here is another feature request called "Forum locking" that we could all vote for, http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-12944. This discussion's URL is in the description (which is how I found this thread!) however there are only a few votes for it at the moment.

We currently override the student's role to prevent discussion and replies and as the Moodle Administrator in a large University I often get requests for this ("read only forums").
We have only allowed our Uni's distributed Help Desk staff to override roles and decided against allowing lecturers/tutors do this. Our decision is mainly because you cannot restrict which capabilities are able to be overridden and some staff may (and will at the worst possible time!) inadvertently override a capability they do not understand and open an area that students should not have access to...

Lets vote for the Locking Forum issues and hope Román Huerta gets some support smile

Teresa
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In reply to Teresa Gibbison

Re: Vote! How do I stop students from posting to a forum?

by John Isner -
We have only allowed our Uni's distributed Help Desk staff to override roles and decided against allowing lecturers/tutors do this. Our decision is mainly because you cannot restrict which capabilities are able to be overridden and some staff may (and will at the worst possible time!) inadvertently override a capability they do not understand and open an area that students should not have access to...

A very wise decision! Do you think that with adequate training, lecturers/tutors can ever be trusted to override roles? (Not everyone, of course, but just those who have been trained). Do believe such training feasible in your environment?
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In reply to John Isner

Re: Vote! How do I stop students from posting to a forum?

by Steve Hyndman -

Do believe such training feasible in your environment?

I'm interested in hearing input about that as well...my answer would be "No".

But you know, there are some common, basic, simple things that nearly everyone who uses forums in online or web-assisted classes need to be able to do with forums that you would think these common things would be made easy to accomplish....in fact, I think I even saw that once upon a time.

Steve

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In reply to Steve Hyndman

Re: Vote! How do I stop students from posting to a forum?

by Teresa Gibbison -
John asks: "Do you think that with adequate training, lecturers/tutors can ever be trusted to override roles?"
John - I would have to say that there are some VERY capable lecturers that I would fully trust to be able to override roles, however that means creating a new role and making sure only the right people had access to that role etc etc

Steve, like you I also miss that setting (I had actually forgotten about it until now, what version was that - 1.5?!?!). It provided great control for the lecturer and if that option was back in the forum settings I would be VERY happy!! I wonder if that would be hard to bring back or if the capabilities would confuse things?!?

Cheers
Teresa
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In reply to Elaine Walsh

Re: How do I stop students from posting to a forum?

by Paul Nijbakker -
Hello Elaine,

In the forum you can go to Update this forum and click the Roles tab and subsequently add all students to the guest role. That will effectively block them from doing anything else than read in that forum.

Of course you can also create a custom role for this, but I agree that just a drop down menu choice to stop posting would be easier. smile

Rgrds,
Paul.
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In reply to Paul Nijbakker

Re: How do I stop students from posting to a forum?

by Elaine Walsh -

Hi Paul,

I tried that and it worked (even if it does take ages) so thank you. I really hope they bring back the option of changing the forum type to "no discussions, no replies", as it's fast and effective!

Elaine

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In reply to Elaine Walsh

Re: How do I stop students from posting to a forum?

by Linda Screen -

Hi everyone

I've just discovered this posting, and you may find this useful.  It's an option to allow timestart and timeend dates to forums. Maybe if we all vote for it we may help push it to 1.9???

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=70211

Linda

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In reply to Linda Screen

Re: How do I stop students from posting to a forum?

by Helen Foster -
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Hi Linda,

Please note that the timed posts feature is included in Moodle 1.8 onwards. It can be enabled by checking the forum_enabletimedposts in forum settings (via Administration > Modules > Activities).
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In reply to Helen Foster

Re: How do I stop students from posting to a forum?

by Linda Screen -

Thanks Helen - I hadn't realised that it had been included.

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