Moodle

I think we have the same issue. At the moment I'm thinking that students can't reply to a teacher's post if that post is sent to no particular group. This even though all students can see the teacher's post.

A solution to this, and a nice feature in it's own right, would be to have an option for the teacher to explicitly post all groups with a single action.

I read MDL-16375 really quickly, but these two seem related.

hello,

if you enable separate groups students:
1/ can see posts from the group they belong to or posts to everybody
2/ students can post for their group only
3/ replying has the same rules as adding new posts

closing, can not reproduce, works as expected

Petr

Hi,

Jussi's description of the problem matches our experience and as such I do not think it works as expected.

In 1.9.2, when a teacher posts a message to "all groups", then no student, whether in a group or not, can reply to that post.

I feel that a message posted to "all groups" should be reply-able by any student. Am I missing something?

Steve

I was missing something!
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=107106

I still think it is confusing for users in the current setup but not sure how it could be better designed.

Separate groups are defined as "fully separate" which means that students from different groups may not even see each other no matter what teacher does, in 1.9.2 it was not correct and there was a breach in separate group privacy - it was fixed in 1.9.3.

I am sorry, this is going to stay the way it is now.

I am sorry this issue is being handled in this manner. The functionality provided by the previous design is what all of my teachers who use forums with groups want... the new design will cripple the ease of use of Moodle forums for them. I assert it is ludicrous to posture a "separate group" as being separate beyond the control of the teacher – the one who created the separate group and controls all other aspects of the course.

Unfortunately there are two groups of users - one groups requires fully separate groups the other (your) requires semi separate group mode in forums. No matter what we do somebody is going to complain, official strict definition of separate groups has higher priority here because privacy issues are very important for us. If you do not like it, please tweak your moodle and publish it as a patch into contrib, this is one of the benefits of using opensource software - you can do anything with the source course

... or somebody might create a patch that adds forum configuration option that allows admin to select required behaviour, any volunteers?

Is this not a classic case where internal Moodle logic runs totally counter to usability for the very people that it's designed for? It seems that Petr is asserting that if a course has 30 groups (separate) and the teacher wants to post instructions or whatever for all students then she has to post into each group individually. This effectively makes separate groups unusable for discussion forums since the Teacher will usually, if not always, need to make a "seed" posting to all groups and have them respond in their groups.

I'm wondering if another approach might be to have those who want there groups "completely" separate not make a posting that includes everybody. That way, the problem is solved for both constituent groups with no extra effort on either's part. And no core mods need to be done and redone and redone and redone and redone in the various institutions that want the old behavior back.

To Mark: Separate groups have a strictly defined meaning - sorry, that can not be changed.

BUT I agree that there should be an option for "seeding" of discussions in separate mode. I think it should be relatively easy to implement and also very easy to use/explain, do we agree?