New feature enhancement for Course groupings in Moodle 2

In Moodle many teachers typically deliver core content from a single shared course but use the "Groupings" feature to provide tailored resources and activities which only their student groups can see.

• See http://docs.moodle.org/22/en/Groupings
• Watch this video from Teach Meet Belfast, http://youtu.be/OoQNte7Fz9c for an overview of the thinking behind this feature request.

THE PROBLEM WITH GROUPINGS
When using the "Groupings" feature in a shared course

• those with "Editing Teacher" permissions are able to edit over each other's groupings.
• those with "Non-Editing Teacher" permissions are un-able to add value to core course content by adding new grouping activities contextualized to their own student group.

This feature request provides suggestions to address this problem, enhance the groupings usability and provide a mechanism for a team of teacher's to evolve the design of core course content collaboratively.

The benefits of using the current Groupings feature are:

• A group of students in a course can only see the specific resources and activities associated with their grouping. This is useful for providing tailored content to specific student groups.
• Resources and activities that have no allocated grouping can be seen by everybody. This is useful for pushing core content to all teachers and students.
• All teachers can see each others groupings of resources and activities. This is useful for teachers seeing each others work and becoming aware of different teaching approaches.

The downsides of using the current Groupings feature are:

• Teachers with editing permissions within a shared course can edit other's resources and activities.
• Teachers cannot filter course content to make visible only their grouping/s activities/resources.
• Administering the groupings feature is relatively complex to setup and manage for multiple users.

As a result:

• Resources and activities in groupings are open to being overwritten by unauthorised teachers.
• Teachers new to Moodle are typically given non-editing permissions over a course limiting their opportunity to learn Moodle and add value to core course content by adding new grouping activities contextualized to their own student group.
• Multiple visible groupings in a single course can be confusing to look at and interpret.

PROPOSED SOLUTION
Create an "Adaptive learning design" capability so that when a user (like a teacher) edits the course they:

• Can be assigned limited editing rights to only be able to add activities or resources to their assigned groupings.
• Can add an activity/resource to their assigned groupings making it un-editable for teachers who are not a member of that grouping i.e. by removing the update, hide, delete...functions for the grouping's activities and resources.
• Can assign viewing rights but not editing rights over their grouping's activities and resources for other course users.
• Can filter the viewing of activities and resources from "My groupings" or "Another user's groupings" using a multi-choice filter, for example to view only grouping A and grouping D as well as core course content i.e. combining different variations of a learning sequence as the course view.
• Can be given the capacity to "Star" rate another user's activity/resource under a grouping to highlight what they think is quality learning design i.e. introducing a more dynamic "social", "professional recognition" aspect to drive the ongoing evaluation and evolution of a course, ideally based on student engagement analytics data.

PLEASE VOTE FOR THESE ENHANCEMENTS ON THE TOP RIGHT
I have had some positive feedback from teachers on the usefulness of this proposed 'Groupings' enhancement for example:

"This functionality would be extremely useful. It would allow us to have one course with consistent delivery outcomes, but would allow the teachers to customise the course to their delivery style, the class size and their class demographic. It would also hugely enhance the sharing of the excellent resources our TAFE teachers are developing." - Accounting teacher, TAFE NSW, SWSi.

Please provide feedback and comments below on how to move this feature forward for a future version of Moodle 2.

Kind regards

Steven