I am pursuing a certain functionality, i.e., the grading of forums on a per-student basis, rather than the per-post basis that seems to be the Moodle default.
The only documentation I found on this missing feature was this workaround (http://docs.moodle.org/en/Forum_module#Grading_forums), which makes it possible to "house" a forum within an assignment.
My questions are these: just what is the nature of this "housing" and how does one implement it?
Sock - Would it be an option of just rating one of the student's posts. In 1.9 you can choose the aggregation type of the forums and choose either max, min, average, sum, or count. It is still rating based rather than student but you may be able to get the results you want. Peace - Anthony
Anthony, yes, ideally I'd like to rate just one post per user-forum, i.e. each rating is specific to a unique user-forum combination.
The aggregation-type functionality sounds like something I could use to my advantage. The Moodle platform I've been given is running 1.8.*, but an upgrade is in the works.
Lacking that, I can't (yet) experiment with various forum aggregation types. Regarding unrated posts, does the aggregator ignore them or assume rating=0? I would prefer to configure forums with "average" aggregation by default, so long as unrated posts were ignored.
The aggregation-type functionality sounds like something I could use to my advantage. The Moodle platform I've been given is running 1.8.*, but an upgrade is in the works.
Lacking that, I can't (yet) experiment with various forum aggregation types. Regarding unrated posts, does the aggregator ignore them or assume rating=0? I would prefer to configure forums with "average" aggregation by default, so long as unrated posts were ignored.
Sock Puppet - In 1.8 average is the default behavior and I believe that it ignore not rated posts. In fact, I suspect it simply averages the ratings that exist so you would have to rate a post as a zero in order to have it lower the average. I'm speaking off of the top of my head and not actually looking at the code but I am reasonably certain that is what happens (in both 1.8 and 1.9). The problem I ran into as a teacher was that I could not keep track of which students I had already rated. As a result, I preferred to rate every post; however, I was looking for one quality/substantial post but also wanted to allow/encourage students to make shorter posts or questions in response to their classmates. As a result, I really wanted to use the max aggregate type since the average would lower the grade of the student who made a shorter response. But if you keep track of which students you have rated, then it should work fine for you (if I understand you correctly). Peace - Anthony