Itamar Tzadok

You can use the Dataform module for that. In this module you can design the activity and the submission form as desired.

For instance, for 6 calls, you can set the activity to require the student to submit exactly 6 entries, one entry per call. Each entry form can have a text area or editor field for the student report. You can even structure the report by breaking it down with further fields for various input types. If you want to allow supervisors to add their feedback to each report, you can add to the entry form fields that the student can see but not update and only the supervisor can update. Finally, you can set the activity completion by number of entries, so that it is shown completed once the student has submitted the 6 entries.

If you wish to give it a try and have further questions about the module, we continue the discussion in the Dataform forum (https://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=8192) where you can find other ideas about what it the module can do for you.

hth

Richard Oelmann has described here an approach that might work for you and doesn't need any plugins.

Yes, well, neither Vygotsky's view of knowledge nor Moodle's foundations nor your reference to both actually address the issues I raise in my comment. Should this be attributed to the fact that your replay was posted at 1:53 AM? (we are in the same time zone aren't we?)

I think a more productive question should be how to go beyond the well-worn "one forum post and two comments" formula.

Is this a more productive question?

It brings to mind the question "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" aka "Gettier Problem" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem). Not so much for the philosophical problem, but rather for what it can teach us about the value of really good "one forum post and two comments". "Is Justified Treu Belief Knowledge?" is a 1963 3-page paper that shook the foundations of an established concept of konwledge credited to Plato (~ 400 BCE). It triggerred much discussion and followups which many career works failed to acheive. And it has been said to be Gettier's one and only important contribution throughout his academic career.

This suggests that the problem is often not in the formula but in how the formula is used.

How do we get meaningful, engaging discussions going that draw learners in to wrestle with complex issues, share their thoughts and views, take risks, and especially engage with each others' thoughts and ideas in constructive and critical ways, rather than the all too common "pathological politeness" we tend to get from novice learners, even at graduate levels?

There is a trivial answer to this question. The instructor/facilitator/learner has to wrestle with the same in the same context of the other target learners. Even then meaningful engagement will be only marginal. One reason for the latter is that the all too common "pathological politeness", as you put it, is merely another name for the mean of the common "bell curve" or normal distribution of pretty much evertything we do. How many Sheldon Cooper can there be?

1 row textarea is not the same input text and both rendering methods are viable options.

I think that a question definition should allow selecting a renderer, and renderers should be pseudo plugable as classes in a designated name space under the question type (similar to adding events). This way if I want to add a renderer to a question type I can do that by means of 1 php file in the designated name space. We may need to consider core string api for handling lang strings that such pseudo plugins may want to introduce. The other way could be by a real plugin but that might be an overkill in many cases such as replacing input text with textarea.