The ideas in this post have been around for years.  What prompted this was a post from Dan on Moodle.org asking for feedback on compelling features of ForumNG, one of the projects out of the Open University.  Looks like there is a possibility of improved forums in Moodle core.  COOL!!

Philosophical preamble

Where Moodle is concerned I personally work in the areas of course design, staff development and teaching with Moodle. Staff development includes online teaching generally, helping staff become good designers and helping with setup of Moodle sites: everything except setting up, optimising and tweaking servers.

Recently I have had to work with hosted Moodle instances where it costs lots of money to get small items fixed, to install plugins or even get good themes.

 I have two main interests

• Improving the effectiveness of teaching tools and processes for teaching and learning online
• Advocating a Moodle core that does as much of this as possible.

The focus of this post is getting a good forum into the core of Moodle.

What do I mean by a “Good Forum”?

Lets start with three aspects:

• ease of use (for students and teachers)
• supporting learning, dialogue, knowledge creation . .
  Don Hinkleman has a nice succinct post on Moodle.org.
• routine and random communications (Student <> student and Staff <> students)

Here a few forum features that contribute to either ease of use, improved learning or communication

I’m assuming: multiple file attachments, users can insert images, nice WYSIWYG editor, threaded views.  Using the term “discussion” rather than thread since this is what Moodle uses. Referring to ForumNG as it is a viable option for the way ahead.

1. Forum views. If you have worked with the ForumNG, with the collapsed/them expand view is great. It is a time saver, and improves efficiency. Think of a student working over several forums in their course (not to mention blogs), and trying to engage in some basic knowledge creation.
   See below: expand links, etc
   
   Also in ForumNG you can post while viewing the whole thread.
2. Permalinks. Trying to write and think over a couple of forums/discussions basically is easier with a quick permalink. See above.
   Marginalia appends a link in a Moodle post when you cut and paste from another form.  Quite nice.
3. Merge discussions (Split discussions) Obvious.  Useful tools for a moderator function.
4. Sticky discussions. These would save a lot of time in Administration type forums in a course. (These could also save a LOT of time in Moodle.org)
5. Thread closed/resolved option. 
6. Subscribe at the discussion level. [One of the oldest Moodle tracker items.
7. Clean forum search.
8. “Show all posts by person X” in this forum
9. Manage Drafts. Obvious for a busy student/teacher. (“Opps, need more info” save, then come back later with the data)
10. Social side: “Me to” button. Voting.
11.  Tagging. This is a wider issue.
    Scenario: you are scanning 35 incoming posts. Click “Read later” those you need to attend to in detail.
    Other possible built in tags: “Watch”, “Vote” . . .
12. Mail NOW option for Admins.
13. Link to show attachments. ALL the attatchments in a forum.
    Scenario: Assignments are submitted publically. Click to see them all.
    Scenario: “Where is the file I posted?” in a forum of 46 discussions and 1053 posts.
14. Romantic stuff, what we had in 2004. “Promote this student to admin of forum”.

Plus?? list abandoned for now . . comment if you want to.

I’ve now completed a few small pilot training sessions in Moodle 2 .0. Some general comments:

The same:

Workflow: Edit mode on, the Add resources/Add activities dropdowns, the icons, Sections
Forums (the bug with Q&A forums is still there)
Groups/groupings (except for new site wide groups aka cohorts)

Different

1. Navigation in the new Navigation block is a challenge, with the navigation block, section naming, docking etc.
2. The new file system takes a bit of getting used to if you are used to Course Files in 1.9.  I have not enabled the Legacy Course Files repository.  The systems we use have no File System repository enabled.
3. Blogs are looking more like blogs now, with comments. Some users are struggling with navigation.   Unfortunately you cannot restrict visibility to course level , and you cannot view all Course blog posts by student X.
4. Gone: multiple file upload plugin, Journals (!)

New

1. Conditional release, activity completion (enables simple dependencies to be built)
2. Improved editor
3. New wiki
4. Blocks: Comments block, Course completion block, Private files block
5. Private files for everyone, including students.  And they can ut images in forum posts.
6. There are other things . . . .  have not used them yet . . .

Philosophicaly speaking I now see again the need to approach things in three stages. Much as I dislike standard workshops, I use this (linear) sequence, based on a very very simple course design.

1. EXPERIENCE: See and experience Moodle as a student.  I do a field trip to Moodle in a course on Coffee Appreciation.
2. DESIGN: Look at the design of the experience.  Critique it.  Plan a simple design for a section.
3. BUILD: Implement it in Moodle.

I now have two basic workshops on offer: Online, a Month of Moodle and a three hour Design and Build in Moodle 2.

moodlenz.net/ No left menu, two top navigation menus

Based on Ardvaark theme: e-bhp.wszechnica.com/ (you can hardly tell this is Moodle)

FIRST OF A SERIES (Maybe)

You could think of Moodle as being like a walled garden. It’s a private online space, which is divided into things called courses, each of which has members.

A walled garden has two aspects. It can be safe or it can be merely isolated and cutoff. However, as I have posted in other forums I think for a formal taught course, providing some sort of freedom and boundaries is good, and from there it can be used as a base for free range learning. (Authentic learning, and a few other buzz words)

For the geeks, Moodle needs a server, PHP, MySQL and so on. I’m interested to note that the standard install does not include some small features that I think are absolutely essential and some that are pretty good. Like the Book module.

I’ve seen quite a significant change in the last two or three versions of Moodle. However, from a personal point of view, there are still a number of things that I’d like to see built in and standard.

At the moment I keep some of my chicken scratchings on this topic at Akowiki.  Just a brain dump, little more.

Some of you know my history:

• 2005, Moodle workshops at another local institution.
• 2006 a large number of Blackboard workshops (like 40 plus) to help migrate staff from WebCT to Blackboard
• 2007 WebCT/Bb
• 2008 the Moodle trial at the University of Canterbury.

The final result of the trial announced in November last year was that we would move to a single supported LMS in 2010, which was to be Moodle. It’s been like a death after 8 years working with Interact. We are now in the middle of a transition process. So Moodle occupies a fair bit of my mind at the moment.

Some of my thoughts include:

• Navigation issues – crazy bread crumbs, no left menu
• The best way to support content delivery
• Blogs (or the lack of them in Moodle)
• Wikis – Moodle has an inbuilt wiki
• The reflective journal – not yet functional
• The file sharing “Database”
• Multimedia capacity

I think it will take a year to get Moodle to where StudentNet/Interact was in terms of some basic utility.  But in other things, Moodle will make people’s lives after Interact just nice.

So what?  What basic functionality is needed to teach&learn in a formal course? [Social networking aside for now]  What functionality provides a good walled garden in the middle of a taught course, with the right amount of porousness and openness?