Activities: Hot Question
mod_hotquestion
Maintained by 
AL Rachels
This plugin will help teachers to collect entries/posts from users in or out of a classroom.
692 sites
233 downloads
39 fans
Moodle 2.8, 2.9, 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 3.8, 3.9, 3.10
The first Moodle activity for a physical classroom. The idea comes from Purdue University's hotseat.
Some possible uses:
- Users can make posts in "real" time during a face-to-face class/lecture/meeting.
- Users can make posts 24/7 in a Hot Question activity.
- Can be used as a "Suggestion Box" with labels changed to reflect the activity is for suggestions.
- Can be used for user analysis of any kind of data placed in the description.
- Can be used for user analysis of a video placed in the description.
- Can be used for quick polls.
- Can be used for classroom auctions.
Inside or outside a classroom, users can post into this activity from any device which can access the Moodle site. Users can also apply Heat, (vote) on other users posts, so that the hottest post will be popped up to the top of the list. Teachers can set a priority, either positive or negative, on selected posts, which overrides the Heat. Teachers can also control visibility of user entries, with an approval setting for each individual entry.
General capabilities:
- Site admin, teacher, or manager can show or hide author names from students, but still see all author names, themselves.
- Site admin, teacher, or manager can show or hide Priority or Heat columns depending on need.
- Site admin, teacher, or manager can change the words used for the column labels.
- Site admin, teacher, or manager can delete individual questions.
- Site admin, teacher, or manager can hide individual questions.
- Teacher or manager can download questions from the classroom Hot Question activity.
- Site admin can download questions from Hot Question activity for the whole site.
- Site admin, teacher, or manager can delete any round they are currently viewing including any questions and votes in the round.
- When anyone clicks on the Hot Question link in an Activities block, depending on the group settings they see a list of all Hot Question activities in the course along with how many unique users, and how many unique questions were posted the current round.
Recently added capabilities:
- Round number display, in the form of, X of N, between round navigation icons.
- Hide author names from students, but teachers still see them.
- New Heat/Vote limit setting.
- New, Remove my vote, capability.
- Auto hide Heat/vote column when set to zero.
- New column labels are used in teacher csv download.
- Admin download uses the default labels due to downloading ALL questions from a site.
- Column labels are now settings which allows teachers to change each to fit the current activity use.
- If a Hot Question is hidden in the Activities list, the Hot Question name will now show with a slashed eye.
- Setting to show or hide the Priority column
- Setting to show or hide the Heat column
- Groups
- Grouping
- Group members only
- Confirm delete entry
- Confirm delete round
- Changed Delete round icon
- Open and Close dates now show in the Calendar
- + release is to fix Open Calendar regression
- Modified the ordering of the fields in the CSV Question downloads, to make reading the results in a spreadsheet easier, by placing Content last. This helps with readability as that column is usually very wide.
- Added the Teacher priority and Heat (votes) to the CSV Question downloads.
- Made the SQL for the CSV cross DB compatible so it now works for PostgreSQL database users.
- Implemented width and height styles to the thumbsup and thumbdown icons used for teacher priority and heatas with Moodle 3.6 they switch from gif to svg and with the styles setting, they are huge.
- Provided a separate language string for the "Post" button so Hot Question is not sharing a core string. The new string now shows as, "Click to post." Makes it possible to customize the button label, without affect a Moodle core language string.
- Modified the Behat tests to account for the new language string used on the Click to post, button. Also fixed a few other Behat steps that worked in previous Moodle versions, but not in Moodle 3.6. Tests now work as expected.
- Fixed a problem where the initial Teacher priority of zero would not be shown, and you would have to manually make it go positive, before you could go to negative number. It depended on the various combinations of Moodle, PHP, and database in use, but now works reliably in all versions of Moodle.
- Added code for GDPR compliance.
- Added a setting that allows the teacher to set a priority rating for each question.
- Added an approval setting for each question so the teacher can hide inappropriate questions.
- Added groups capability.
- Added 12 Behat tests.
- Added setting for, "Display description on course page."
- Added settings for open and close Availability dates.
- Added setting to allow changing, "Submit your question here" to whatever the teacher wants when creating a Hot Question activity.
- Included an optional icon for this activity, that is more "activity purpose" neutral than the light bulb.
Link to the old forum discussion https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=158368#p714750
Useful links
Screenshots
Contributors
AL Rachels (Lead maintainer)
Zhigang Sun: Original author
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I was trying to find a basic equivalent to UserVoice (where IT software companies capture ideas from end-users for product feature enhancements). One of the features with UserVoice is an end user can add as many ideas as they like, can see everyone else's idea - but can only vote a certain number of times (configurable - but most companies only allow 3 votes). So a person voting can vote for their own or someone else's idea/s, they can place multiple votes on a single idea or spread their votes out - but only up to a maximum of the permitted number of votes per person. This forces people to really think about what they want as they only have limited votes - but still allows you to capture all the ideas out there.
Once as a software vendor you decide you are going to implement one of the ideas, you mark it as 'in progress' and that does a couple of things - it notifies everyone who voted on it that their idea is being worked on; and importantly, it releases those votes so the end users can then place their vote on another idea/s (e.g. if they placed all 3 of their permitted votes on one idea, it goes to 'in progress' then they then have 3 votes available to place on other idea/s).
Not sure how easy/hard all that would be to do in Hot Question, but to start with, a configurable number of votes with only one vote per entry (so therefore students can vote for say 3 different entries only) would be a good start - it means that people have to commit to which entries are most important to them.
We are using Moodle 3.7 and will upgrade to 3.9 in September.
Thank you for adding the time-gated slots to your TODO-List
I have more Moodle versions to test this plugin on before making an official release, and would love to have some feedback from other users, especially if your Moodle uses PostgreSQL. I have only one Moodle 3.3.9+ using PostgreSQL 9.6, so any help would be greatly appreciated.
As far as, "but if you mean a user cannot remove a vote once they have submitted their answer" - You misunderstand. Voting has nothing to do with submitting. Hot Question will let you vote before or after making an entry, just as long as you are enrolled in the course, and in a group, if group requirements are set. Plus, you can make multiple entries. Currently, there is not a limit on that.
By the way, if you visit the Website URL listed in the links above, you can self register and self enroll into the Hot Question Demo course and try out Hot Question yourself.
If the heat limit is set to zero, the Heat column is automatically hidden from view. Currently the maximum can be set to 10.
An indicator is added under the column label shown as Max/Remaining. e.g. If the limit is set to 3 and I have voted once, it will show as, 3/2. If a user removes a vote from a question, their Remaining votes goes back up by one. If the teacher starts a new round, their Remaining votes automatically goes back up to Max.
No, not really. It would be more appropriate to use a forum for that. However, you can sort of do it by using the teacher ranking to make the teachers question come right after the students question.
Maybe someone can help me.
We are currently converting Moodle to 3.9.1 (Build 20200717) and have the problem that the two columns "Head" and "Priority" are suddenly missing. We are using the latest version 3.9.0+ (Build: 2020060603). At 3.8 everything worked as expected. Does anyone know the problem or has any tips?
Sorry you are having problems. There is not a column named "Head" unless you changed one from it's default name to Head. Maybe you mean, "Heat?" Go and edit the Hot Question activity and look at the settings for, Heat and Priority. It is possible that their visibility setting has been set to, No, which would make them disappear.