Edited by Sam Marshall, Friday, 13 Aug 2010, 14:28
I got asked some questions about oublog (I mean, from somebody who is considering using it on their Moodle system), and I thought the answers might be useful to other people, so I'm reposting here.
What is the Personal blogs link on the front page?
The link on the home page takes you to the personal blog for the current user. I don't think there is a way to remove it, so please just hide it if you don't want the personal blog facility (if you are only using course blogs).
How can I set a course blog up for use as a journal where only the student involved, and a teacher on the course, can see that student's personal blog?
a - Set 'Individual blogs' option on blog settings to 'Separate individual blogs' (means students can't see each others' blogs)
b - Make sure your teacher role(s) has the 'View individual blogs' capability (I think they should have this by default but just to check)
c - Decide whether or not to use group mode:
i. If you only have one teacher there is no point.
ii. If you have lots of different teachers, each of which has their own group of students, then use group mode. Use visible groups if the teachers are allowed to see each others' students, or separate groups (and of course make sure the teachers belong to the groups) if they are only allowed to see their own students.
Who can edit comments?
You can delete comments (your own; or whoever posted the blog post can delete all comments; so can admins obviously), but not edit them. We didn't provide an edit facility for comments because they're supposed to be kind of trivial. [Also because, since we have to make sure everything's auditable, making them editable adds a lot of complexity.]
Could you add a grading option when upgrading the module to Moodle 2?
I will see what we can do but can't promise anything unless we manage to get some internal users to request it.
If we added grading, how should it work? Would you want the teacher to grade the student's participation (i.e. a single grade) or to rate each post like on forum (i.e. ratings per post with some kind of aggregation feature, like taking the average, to come up with an overall grade)?
My guess is that the former is more useful - but it's also something you can achieve already by manually adding a grade for the activity in the gradebook and having teachers use the gradebook interface to set the grade, so we'd only be making the interface a bit nicer.
OU blog questions
I got asked some questions about oublog (I mean, from somebody who is considering using it on their Moodle system), and I thought the answers might be useful to other people, so I'm reposting here.
What is the Personal blogs link on the front page?
The link on the home page takes you to the personal blog for the current user. I don't think there is a way to remove it, so please just hide it if you don't want the personal blog facility (if you are only using course blogs).
How can I set a course blog up for use as a journal where only the student involved, and a teacher on the course, can see that student's personal blog?
a - Set 'Individual blogs' option on blog settings to 'Separate individual blogs' (means students can't see each others' blogs)
b - Make sure your teacher role(s) has the 'View individual blogs' capability (I think they should have this by default but just to check)
c - Decide whether or not to use group mode:
i. If you only have one teacher there is no point.
ii. If you have lots of different teachers, each of which has their own group of students, then use group mode. Use visible groups if the teachers are allowed to see each others' students, or separate groups (and of course make sure the teachers belong to the groups) if they are only allowed to see their own students.
Who can edit comments?
You can delete comments (your own; or whoever posted the blog post can delete all comments; so can admins obviously), but not edit them. We didn't provide an edit facility for comments because they're supposed to be kind of trivial. [Also because, since we have to make sure everything's auditable, making them editable adds a lot of complexity.]
Could you add a grading option when upgrading the module to Moodle 2?
I will see what we can do but can't promise anything unless we manage to get some internal users to request it.
If we added grading, how should it work? Would you want the teacher to grade the student's participation (i.e. a single grade) or to rate each post like on forum (i.e. ratings per post with some kind of aggregation feature, like taking the average, to come up with an overall grade)?
My guess is that the former is more useful - but it's also something you can achieve already by manually adding a grade for the activity in the gradebook and having teachers use the gradebook interface to set the grade, so we'd only be making the interface a bit nicer.