Itamar Tzadok

I'm definitely not against flexibility. What I find interesting are the various ways for applying pedagogical preferences to current or future features (or vice versa).

Here is another question. If these are focused conversations and you require only one substantial contribution, why is it important to rate the secondary contributions? What happens if you don't rate these secondary contributions? Will the grade be lower because it accounts for non-graded secondary contributions by calculating an average?

If you choose max rating how do you account for a student who posts one excellent contribution in the begining of the course and then silence forever? Surely quantity plays a role here at least to some extent as it reflects the student's commitment to the discussion. Furthermore, it is not merely the quantity but also its dispersion over the discussion period. It seems to me that we will need a highly sophisticated scheme for covering all these evaluation aspects if we go by individual message ratings, and I doubt that such a scheme is feasible.

 by clicking the poster's name. You can also use 'search forums'.

You can force 'visible groups' in the course's settings and create 'students group' for the students. 'All participants' will show all people in the course including the teachers but when you select the 'students group' you will see only the students. This is just a bypass, though. There might be a better way to do that but I don't know it yet. 

But I'm not sure about that. If you prepare topics in advance you can alternatively create single discussion forums, such that each one represents a topic, and arrange them in any order you like. This order won't change.