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Dialogue module: Difference between revisions

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==Settings==
==Settings==
[[Image:DialogueSettings.gif|thumg|Dialogue Settings]]
[[Image:DialogueSettings.gif|thumb|Dialogue Settings]]
* Type of dialogue can be set to Teacher-Student, Student-Student, Anyone-Anyone
* Type of dialogue can be set to Teacher-Student, Student-Student, Anyone-Anyone
* Ability for Students (or any role) to initiate a Dialogue can be managed in the activity role overrides
* Ability for Students (or any role) to initiate a Dialogue can be managed in the activity role overrides

Revision as of 04:46, 3 July 2009

Dialogues allow students or teachers to start two-way dialogues with another person. They are course activities that can be useful when the teacher wants a place to give private feedback to a student on their online activity. For example, if a student is participating in a language forum and made a grammatical error that the teacher wants to point out without embarassing the student, a dialogue is the perfect place.

Dialogue is a contributed activity module originally released for Moodle 1.6.x. and subsequently updated for Moodle 1.8.x to support roles and capabilities and most recently updated to support Moodle 1.9.x and Groupings (groups of groups)

Features

  • Teachers can initiate private Dialogues between themselves and individual students
  • Teachers can initiate individual Dialogues with all members of a group at one time
  • Users can attach documents to their dialogue posts
  • Students can view a time-stamped history of interaction between themselves and their teachers / tutors within the context of papers.
  • Teachers and Students can view time-stamped histories of the interaction between them. Teachers can additionally view interaction histories with all students within a particular paper.
  • Users can receive notification of new Dialogue posts via e-mail subscription
  • Students can edit Dialogue posts within a specified period of time (30min default).

Settings

Dialogue Settings
  • Type of dialogue can be set to Teacher-Student, Student-Student, Anyone-Anyone
  • Ability for Students (or any role) to initiate a Dialogue can be managed in the activity role overrides
  • Can configure whether a Dialogue activity should allow more than one Dialogue between any two participants
  • Can enable/disable email notification
  • Can set the number of days after which a closed Dialogue will be removed
  • Admin setting at site-level to control display of unread dialog count on course pages

Roles/Capabilities

The following capabilities are able to be assigned/set against site wide roles and overridden in your local Dialogue instances:

  • mod/dialogue:open
  • mod/dialogue:close
  • mod/dialogue:manage
  • mod/dialogue:viewall - allow users to have read access to dialogues which they are not a participant
  • mod/dialogue:participate
  • mod/dialogue:participateany - allows users to participate in dialogues that are not initiated with themselves

Tips and tricks

  • When students initially enroll on a site, it might be a good idea to send them a welcome dialogue to let them know the teacher is there. This way if the student has something to say to the teacher, they will feel more comfortable responding, since the teacher made the first step.

Module History

  • 2003/Oct - Ray Kingdon released the original module
  • 2004/Jun - Dialogues with groups of students were supported
  • 2006/Apr - Howard Miller (aka thepurpleblob) University of Glasgow, contributed fixes to bring Dialogue in line w v1.6
  • 2006/Aug - Howard Miller volunteered to maintain the module. At the time he mentioned Messaging was the mechanism MartinD saw as the tool the core project would be supporting for this sort of activity, and that Dialogue was never actually intended to be anything other than an optional module.
  • 2007/May - Clinton Graham provided a diff to get Dialogue running with roles in v1.8
  • 2007 - Catalyst integrated group support allowing allocation of groups (or groupings) to specific activities.
  • 2007/Aug - University of Waikato contract Catalyst to update Dialogue module to support v1.9 and make a number of feature changes
  • 2008/Aug - Reinstated dialogue type selector, various bug fixes (Enrique,Clinton,Lorenzo & Dean)
  • 2009/Feb - Improvements to student-to-student mode and all-participants selection for teachers (Dean)
  • 2009/Mar - Reintroduced unread entries tracking, and validation fix on edittime field (Dean)

Possible Future Developments

Following is a list of future developments. Please feel free to discuss these developments and indicate your priority preference(s) in this forum. Please feel free to add to this list.

  • Close Dialogue conversations when students are unenrolled
  • Sort entries by columns (first name, last name, etc)
  • Participation Report support
  • View current conversation after an update (rather than go back to list of conversations)
  • Display options (threaded like the forum etc)
  • Editalways and delete capability (similar to forums)
  • Export entries (what format - Text, Html, xml??)
  • Group support (sort entries by group)

See also