Moodle in English: Using a forum for 1 to 1 teaching

What do I need to do to set up a forum so that teacher and one student can use it for 1:1 learning?

Just to make sure I understand--are you hoping to set up a forum so that each student can work with a teacher on an individual basis with the forum invisible to the rest of the students in the course?

If this is your goal, then set up the forum to use Separate groups. Then, visit your admin menu and click on Groups. You'll need to create a "group" for each individual student in the course and then assign one student to each group.

Then, when students visit and post to the discussion forum, they will only see their discussion with the teacher. The teacher though, will have a drop-down menu in the top left of the page and be able to see and post to any discussion.

If you need more detailed instructions or if this isn't what you had in mind, let me know.

Michelle,

You understood perfectly what I wanted and the solution is workable. Thanks!!

Now an additional question, please:
Is there an easier way for a teacher and student to have a 1:1 dialog where the student privately responds to lesson content given by the teacher;

the teacher privately responds to the student, asking for more information or clarification of what the student has given;

then the student submits the requested additional information;

finally the the teacher gets another opportunity to respond to the student?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Wayne,

Have you considered using an individual wiki for each student? While creating the wiki, from the drop-down menu labeled Type select Student. Now each time a new student accesses the wiki from the course home page, an individual wiki is created for that student.

While a forum encourages discussion, a wiki is designed to encourage collaboration. The student and teacher can have a "discussion" while creating content, and the wiki preserves the history of their edits.

You can create an initial page for the wiki, which can be the instructions for the assignment.

Greetings William,

Thanks for the advice on using the Wiki format. Sorry for the delay in my response I was trying to make this format work for my application. However unless I can format it so that I give all students a general format and then get their individual responses this will not work for my application. 1. I want to give a writing sample to all my students. 2. Have each student provide me their input. 3. Then I want to give my private comments on each student's input and 4. have them make a final submission using the comments I provided in step 3.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

Wayne Knight

I haven't tried it but here is an idea. Create a database and set it to allow entries only by the teacher and to allow comments. Of course you will have to use separate groups and create the individual groups as suggested above. Then, you add an entry with the question or assignment for all participants. Since group mode is separate each student will see his or her own instance and the student's comments will be on that instance and thus concealed from others but not from you. (Hopefully wink

) Now, if you want to comment on a student's comment you do that in the student's instance. The next assignment will be a new entry for all participants. And so on and so forth...

Again I haven't tried that so I hope it works and works for you

Itamar

Actually, what I suggested above with a database should also work with a forum if you set it such that students can only reply. So you add the writing sample as a discussion topic and the students reply to the topic and you can reply to their replies and since all that is in a separate group mode it is in effect 1:1.

You can also use the single thread forum such that each writing sample resides in a different forum (to work around bouncing discussion topics in case the student decides to reply to a previous topic).

Itamar

Hi Wayne

We have worked with the Catalyst team as the Dialogue tool was a good tool to replace existing functionality in our old system. The Dialogue easily provides a private conversation (or thread) with selected students (or all students) via a dropdown list. Screenshot below.

Refer forum post, http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=9375#p373736. We have plans to iron out some of the issues we are having a release the code so "watch this space"!!

Cheers
Teresa

Forum

Using a forum for 1 to 1 teaching