Hello,
I'm assisting an instructor who has weekly discussion forums. He's decided that he would like to break the discussions into smaller groups, so essentially divide the class in half so they're discussing within their smaller groups. Is there a way in Bb Learn 9.1 to take existing forums and make them into group discussions (assign them to groups), or do I need to recreate each forum for each discussion group?
Thanks!
Thanks so much, Joseph! You're right -- I have one discussion (actually several forums) that I want each group to discuss separately from the other groups. I was hoping it would be easy to convert existing forums to group forums but no such luck. Once I had the discussion groups set up, I was able to copy the existing forums one at a time over to the group discussions space but that brought on a whole host of odd problems. I'll share a few details in case anyone else has experienced something similar. FYI, this is in Learn 9.1, Q4 2016.
For example, during the copy process, I needed to rename each forum. Those new names, however, wouldn't "stick." Within a few minutes every new forum in the group discussion space reverted to "Discussion Group 1" (the name of the group). No matter how many times I renamed the forum and hit submit, the names would always revert so I had a whole list of group discussion forums with the same name. And there were some messy things happening in the grade center, too. One group was set up fine in the GC but the second group was not -- all students in the class were showing up as part of the second group in the grade center, although in the group properties, only selected students were listed.
I ended up putting all the forums back into the main course discussions, deleting the groups and the group set. And that brought on some new weirdness. None of the graded forums were showing up under My Grades. And the grade center still thought half the students were in groups so the forums would show "not participating" in the forums for half the students.
In the end I had to rebuild all the forums in the course discussion board and then both My Grades and the Grade Center behaved as they should. Seems like group threads or duplicate forums, as you mentioned, will be the necessary work-around.
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If you had multiple discussions, you could add adaptive release rules to them for each of the groups. But it sounds like you have one discussion that you want to have each group discuss, while separated from the other groups. This you wouldn't be able to do for the single discussion, as every group would see that single forum. The instructor could have each group discuss within a 'group thread' as a semi-workaround, if you didn't want to create separate forums, and grade the discussion based on the threads instead of the forum as a whole? Not a very pretty workaround, though.