Request: Add a Forum type for one-on-one teacher-student dialogue

Request: Add a Forum type for one-on-one teacher-student dialogue

by Samuli Karevaara -
Number of replies: 7
I added a request for the subject feature (MDL-14592). Martin was of the opinion that it would be going back to the teacher-centered classroom and thus not to be included in Moodle. Dialogue module is the best choice for this at the moment.

However, I added some comments in the bug, summarizing here:

This is not for the sage-on-the-stage but indeed for the guide-on-the-side! The most pressing need we have for this is for guiding different kinds of larger works, like the thesis.

For the "guiding the thesis" use case:
  • the topic is rather individual for each participant, thus the need to have everybody in their own group
  • this is a rather large endeavor that the students usually take on for the first time, thus they often do need personal guiding in both formulating the substance and formatting the paper according to the academic principles
  • as this often requires several "returns" of the paper from the student, and a dialogue with several q's and a's, the Assignment module does not fit perfectly it is not reasonable to suggest that all of this dialogue and unfinished work should be visible to others also, thus the need for privacy
  • we want to go away from email, not towards it smile
  • messaging or instant messaging large attachments is sub-optimal at best
  • this functionality would record the history of the work-under-construction (as attachments), development of the learning that happened while doing the thesis and so on (ideally, obviously GIGO applies here too)

Any thoughts, for or against?
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In reply to Samuli Karevaara

Re: Request: Add a Forum type for one-on-one teacher-student dialogue

by Bruce Long -

I believe you have made a valid distinction between "sage on the stage" and "guide on the side." We have a similar situation with assisting students in sermon development. It helps to have a dialog with the students as their thinking process progresses on their sermons. I have decided to just make those discussions public and used the discussion forum, but a one-to-one dialog area would be helpful.

Bruce Long
Dallas Christian College

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In reply to Samuli Karevaara

Re: Request: Add a Forum type for one-on-one teacher-student dialogue

by Teresa Gibbison -
Hi there

One option is the Dialogue module. We have a modified version of the Dialgoue module which will be available via cvs soon. Our lecturers use this to communicate personally with each participant of a paper.

Another option you could use (which is working successfully for thesis supervision at our University) is using groups and groupings. We have one student (e.g. Teresa) per group (e.g. TeresaGroup) which is in it's own grouping (e.g. TeresaGrouping). We then have the forum and a directory with relevant files allocated to each student by making them only available to that grouping .

This means the lecturer can (of course) view all forums and directories but each thesis student can only see their own forum & directory.

Cheers
Teresa
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In reply to Teresa Gibbison

Re: Request: Add a Forum type for one-on-one teacher-student dialogue

by David Miles -
Can I ask how this works if students are members of more than one group?

The issue is as follows: I teach classes 7A & 7B so I'd like to assign students to each of those groups. I'd also like to be able to work privately with students - so I guess I could create individual groups for each student. However, when posting to a forum they seem to be able to post either as a member of 7A or as a member of their own individual group. I'd like to restrict this so that in a particular forum they can only post as the individual.

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In reply to David Miles

Re: Request: Add a Forum type for one-on-one teacher-student dialogue

by Will H -
It sounds like what you're after is a feature called Groupings. It's already in there but disabled by default. I don't really know enough about it to be able to say much more, but I should think someone on here will be along with more information soon.
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In reply to Will H

Re: Request: Add a Forum type for one-on-one teacher-student dialogue

by Paul Nijbakker -
The Groupings functionality becomes available if you have selected to enable groupings in Site Administration - Miscellaneous - Experimental in Moodle 1.9.

In our online teacher manual we have some instructions for using Groups and Groupings.

Rgrds,
Paul.
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In reply to David Miles

Re: Request: Add a Forum type for one-on-one teacher-student dialogue

by Teresa Gibbison -
The Dialogue is an ONE-to-ONE communication tool between two individuals (in your case you as the teacher and each student separately) so would work for the private 'individual' communication you require for communication with each student. You can then still create groups for any group forum communication as per normal.

If you don't want to use the Dialogue module, Group and Groupings will work for you as Will advises. You would have each student in their own individual group as well as the 7a or 7b class group. You would then 'group your groups' into two groupings, like this:

student 1 [member of] group 7a, group stu1
student 2 [member of] group 7a, group stu2
student 3 [member of] group 7b, group stu3
student 4 [member of] group 7b, group stu4

grouping 'groups' = group 7a, group 7b
grouping 'students' = stu1, stu2, stu3, stu4, etc

Then you could set up a forum with separate group mode and allocate it to grouping 'students' - this would give individual forum threads for each student that no other student would be able to see.

Then you can also have one or more forum activities for any group work that members of one group can interact with each other, allocating the grouping 'groups' to it.

Good luck
Teresa smile
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In reply to Samuli Karevaara

Re: Request: Add a Forum type for one-on-one teacher-student dialogue

by Enrique Castro -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers
Hi Samuli,
Some time ago we at ULPGC had a similar demand for a Forum not so public.
In our case we was using Dialogue as instrument of comunication between staff and students. But been Dialoge absolutely one-to-one, if one staff member was ill or on holidays, no other one could attend the waiting questions.

I developed a new forum type (as general, Q&A, etc.) that I called "private". In that forum type any teacher could see any messages, like a regular forum (provided groups etc). But students can only see their own posts, or replies by the teachers. In that way, in a single place you may have several threads with different students. Several teachers can participate in the same conversation with the student and you get the full Forum display modes and functionality (better than Dialogue). I think it would fit you use case as a glove. I did that customization into Forum for Moodle 1.6 version.

Now we are moving to 1.9 and the inminent semester we are using teh Dialogue version for 1.9 developed at Waikato University that Dean Stringer kindly provided. That version allows others teachers to participate in a conversation (not only one-to-one).

I did not re-made the customizations of Forum to enable "private" mode on 1.9, but it should be pretty esay. I'm attaching our old Forum mod "as is". If you search for the string "private" you would will find the customizations in:
* db/mysql.php to add 'private' label to type enumeration
* lib.php (mainly forum_user_can_view_post, forum_user_can_see_discussion, forum_user_can_post and alike).
(please, note that the files are truncated due to uploading limit)

Hope that this will help you.




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