Moodle Plugins directory: Hot Question | Moodle.org
Hot Question
Activities ::: mod_hotquestion
Maintained by 
AL Rachels
This plugin will help teachers to collect entries/posts from users in or out of a classroom.
Latest release:
886 sites
79 downloads
65 fans
Current versions available: 3
Hot Question is a classroom discussion activity for collecting, ranking, and moderating learner questions in real time or asynchronously.
Learners submit entries from any device, vote on entries from peers, and help surface the most important questions. Teachers can moderate visibility, prioritize posts, and guide discussion flow during live teaching or ongoing course participation.
Typical uses
- Live lecture Q and A
- Asynchronous question board
- Suggestion box and feedback collection
- Quick polls and prioritization activities
- Discussion prompts tied to videos or readings
Key features
- Student posting with configurable labels and prompts
- Voting to raise the most relevant questions
- Teacher priority controls that can override vote order
- Per-entry moderation and approval controls
- Optional comments and round-based workflow
- CSV export for course-level and site-level reporting
- Group and grouping support
- Flexible visibility and display controls
Teacher and admin controls
- Show or hide author names for learners
- Show or hide Heat and Priority columns
- Rename column labels to match activity purpose
- Control access after activity close
- Delete or hide entries and manage rounds
Grading and completion
- Supports grading, passing grade, and activity completion rules
- Configurable participation expectations based on posting and voting
Privacy and quality
- Privacy API support included
- Automated testing and ongoing maintenance
Compatibility
- Moodle 4.5 to 5.1
- Current stable release: 5.0.0
Useful links
Screenshots
Contributors
AL Rachels (Lead maintainer)
Zhigang Sun: Original author
Please login to view contributors details and/or to contact them
I will try to put out a fixed version later today.
There is a new version 2022070700 available!
Release 4.1.0 (Build: 2022070700) Stable version Download More info...
Install this update
Anyway, I just added a new release, Hot Question v4.1.1 with the fix added to it.
I have a suggestion for your (great) plugin : would it be possible to set the default grade for new hot questions activities to none ? Currently, a "point" grade is set automatically on creation. And as soon as a question has been posted in the activity, grades are created, which makes it impossible to reset the grading to "none" subsequently. I think many teachers won't use grading in this activity. If they don't pay attention, they will have a "View grades" button in their activity, which they can't get rid of.
Thanks for your interest in Hot Question. Actually, the "Point" setting seems to be standard in Moodle, unless you go and add a whole lot more of complicated (to me) code. I actually was going that route but due to time constraints and my work load, I switched to this simpler version just to get grading out there.
I can't promise anything soon, but I will put this back into my TODO rotation of things to work on.
I would make a suggestion to make a template activity for each grade type, (hidden and not in the grade book), and then duplicate when you want to create a new Hot Question activity. In fact, due to creating and deleting Hot Question activities so often during development, that is what I do. Before I retired, I had a whole hidden course with nothing but templates of all the various activities I used, and I then used the Sharing Cart in active courses to place a copy of an activity into the course for actual use.
I just installed the latest version of the plugin on Moodle 4.4. It looks like the monologo icon is the old version, not the new one with the smaller content. Looking at the Github repository, a commit from 1 July replaced the new version with the old one (reversing the change from April 24).
I had a glitch occur yesterday when I was trying to create the new release. I am not actually sure where the problem was, my PC, Moodle, or github, but the release kept trying to use a very old version of the plugin. Would it be possible for you to open an issue at https://github.com/drachels/moodle-mod_hotquestion and show me a picture of the two different icons?
would be very nive to have a notification feature build in in one of the next updates. ;)
Originally HotQuestion was supposed to be used in a face-to-face class where everyone was online with the teacher so there was no need for notifications. However, with all the changes that have been added to it, I can see where some setups such as a Suggestion Box, would benefit from having notifications. I will add it to my TODO list, but it could be a while. I am currently on a health sabbatical and taking a little "me" time, but will try to see about adding that by the end of the year.
Teacher/admins can now make entries in old rounds and add comments to any old round entry, or latest round entry. Students can see anything added, but can only make entries and add comments in the current round.
Added a new toolbutton for the teachers and admins that lets them see who voted in a round.
Added round info in the download. Also enriched active event payload and descriptions to log concrete object ids and context (question id, round id, hotquestion id, related user, export scope) for add/remove vote, add/remove question, add/remove round, and download actions.
Oh! Almost forgot. HotQuestion now can be used via Moodle Mobile. AND, you can audio and video record into your entries from desktop or phone. Note that I am an Android phone user so that's all I have been able to test for. If you have an iPhone and test, let me know how it goes.