Best Practices: Increasing Usability with joule’s Advanced Forums

Increasing Usability with joule’s Advanced Forums
By: Laura Lea Rand, M.Ed., Moodlerooms Instructional Designer and Trainer

The use of forums for communication, content delivery, and collaboration are one of the highlights of online learning. Moodlerooms has taken the Moodle core forum module and enhanced it, bringing more control and flexibility to the teacher and student, with a module called Advanced forums.

With Advanced forums, teachers and students feel empowered to find the posts they want to read quickly, saving valuable time in viewing and responding to posts. Teachers feel confident that the grade they are assigning a student is correct because they can view all of the student's posts in one screen while grading. Students and teachers alike enjoy an increased ease of use with quick, simple views into the forums and their discussions.

Some of the key features of joule’s Advanced forums include the ability to:

• Keep up with what’s important to you with the ability to subscribe to only certain discussions within a forum.

• Sort posts by the post date, creation date, first name, last name, or the number of replies. Then control the order of that sort in either ascending or descending fashion.

• Mark posts that enhance and extend the discussion as “Substantive.”

• Bookmark posts that you need to return to later, or that you may want to draw other students attention to in an instructor reply.

• Collect sensitive data from course participants by enabling anonymous posting, while retaining the ability to grade those posts.

• Grade Advanced forums with Advanced grading methods, like core Moodle Rubrics, or joule Checklists.

• Use the joule Grader to quickly and easily grade Advanced forums.

Check out these three videos to see Advanced forums in action!

An Overview of Advanced Forums



Creating Advanced Forums



Grading Advanced Forums with the joule Grader



Thanks for reading and watching!

Best,

- Laura Lea