Grouping Scenario - Discussion Groups
- Matthew Harrington
A large-scale course features discussions. In order for discussions to be more productive, less overwhelming, and to help learners connect with a smaller subset of other learners, those discussions need to be divided into smaller groups. These groups may be monitored by an assigned member of staff such as a tutor, or moderated as a whole by the course team in general.
User Stories
Needs
As a course administrator, I need to be able to dictate whether a discussion topic should be divided between discussion groups, or available to the course as a whole.
As a course administrator, I need to be able to see what each discussion group can see in order to review each group independently and ensure that each group has access to all discussions they should be a part of.
As a course author, when splitting group discussions by group, I need to select which groups receive a discussion area and which groups are ignored, so that learners can be a part of other groups that do not affect discussions.
Wants
As a learner, I want the option to change which discussion group I am a part of to avoid personality clashes and to escape “dead” discussion groups.
As a course team member, I want automatically defined groups to automatically compress to ensure that an acceptable level of discussion activity is maintained, ensuring that “dead” discussion groups do not exist.
As a course author, I want to be able to create and configure groups when assigning discussions to groups, so that I can dynamically create and modify the course group configuration without having to back out of the discussion creation process.
As a course author, I want to be able to allow learners to have read-only access to other group discussions in order to share and ensure learners have access to thought-provoking responses.
Platform Implementations
Open edX
Open edX has two pieces of functionality designed around discussion groups. The first is Cohorts, which divide learners into groups which in turn can be used to divide discussion forums.
Discussions can be set as divided or unified, with all in-content discussions being divided by cohort, and course-wide general discussion topics having the option of being divided.
As of Palm, it is not possible to have an in-content discussion not be divided by cohort if the first option is enabled. It is also not possible to divide course-wide discussion topics without dividing all in-content discussions, as the second option does not appear if the first is disabled. These were possible on prior versions of Open edX, so the functionality appears to have regressed.
Staff have the ability to post to and view all cohorts, whereas learners will only see discussions posted to their cohort if the discussion is divided. They can also see which cohort a post is from when browsing discussions:
Teams provide learners with small group discussion areas that are not affected by Cohorts. When learners join a team, the team is given its own small group discussion area separate from the main discussion forum.
Both of these features provide different ways to shape different forms of smaller group discussions, with Cohorts typically being used for larger learner groupings (hundreds of learners) whereas Teams are typically used for smaller learner groupings (5-10).
Moodle
Moodle discussion forums are created under individual topics, which can then be put into “Group Mode”. There are three settings possible for this property:
No Groups (Learners are not divided)
Separate Groups (Learners only see and contribute to discussions started by their own group members)
Visible Groups (Learners can only contribute to threads from their own groups, but can view submissions from any group)
Once a discussion topic is put into group mode, staff can view the discussion by group in their UI:
It does not appear as though there is a way to only make certain groups “count” for discussion activities. Therefore, in a situation where a learner is a member of many groups for different purposes, instead of being able to select a group mode, the common workaround is to create a discussion forum for all users, restrict posting, and then create a separate discussion thread for each group, restricted to each group. This removes a layer of the hierarchy, and is a clunky experience for staff.
Canvas
In Canvas, group discussions can be enabled with a checkbox when configuring the discussion. Once checked, the instructor can then choose which group set to divide learners using. The instructor also gains access to the tools required to create groups and group sets when configuring the group discussion, just in case the group they want to use does not yet exist.
When configured as group discussions, staff gain access to a list of discussion groups to choose from:
Learners do not appear to gain access to other groups, and are restricted to their own discussion group.