Methodologically the moodle forum should be the centre of most courses if you are really working in a “social constructivist” and “student-centred” way. We should be using it to encourage collaboration and mutual support among students. Moodle Academy offers a short pedagogical course on best practice with forums, which includes a video webinar recorded in 2023.

The webinar begins by distinguishing between “moderator” with permissions that allow a user to police the forum by doing things like:

• sending a private message to a contributor
• splitting a thread
• editing a post

And a “facilitator” who could theoretically be an equal participant in the forum, without any special permissions beyond what the students have, but who has the task of improving the quality of discussion. Typical problems that can be corrected are:

• posts that are off-topic
• posts that merely repeat content without adding anything
• posts that infringe etiquette or style guidelines

Successful participants in the course get a badge!

The main point of this post is an issue not really covered in that course, to do with the setting up of a discussion forum. Here is an experimental grading approach for them…but as the reader will appreciate, I haven’t got the ideal solution yet.

Forums have a possibility of setting a grade for the whole work of the forum. However, it seems to make more sense to allow grades to build up cumulatively as the discussion goes on. This means setting up “ratings” for individual posts with the aggregate type set at “sum of ratings”. We’ll see later how this is reflected in the gradebook.

The forum is set up with auto-subscription. This means that at the beginning of the course, students will receive copies by email of each forum post. However they are free to unsubscribe. (Note that this is different from “forced subscription” the standard set-up in announcements forums.)

There’s a pass grade of 60 for the the forum activity and this allows the student to fulfill the completion condition “passing grade”. On entering the forum these requirements are automatically shown in the students’ chosen language:

It’s vital to manage expectations about the amount of work to be done. So, in the description of the forum, I add the hint that students will need to make at least 4 posts in order to pass.

These grades have a special category in the gradebook which I’m labelling “discussion” or “обсуждение”. In the picture below, a student has asked an interesting question in the forum, and the teacher is going to give 15 points for it:

After receiving 15 points, the student still has more to do.

This score shows up in red in the gradebook because it is lower than the passing score of 60. This is not necessarily going to be motivating for students… it might be worth adding some kind of gamified representation of progress. Otherwise good work by a student could end up being represented as if it was a fail.