Passing grade?

[pejhab]

Hello again,

Is there a way to set a passing grade for moodleoverflow forums?

If not, maybe there should be... ;-)

[NinaHerrmann]

@pejhab please elaborate on your application scenario. What behavior do you expect? Should teacher be enabled to mark students as passed or failed? Should passing grades be automatically generated e.g. writing one post?
It really helps us if you describe it as precise as possible!
Cheers!

[pejhab]

@NinaHerrmann

(This is going to be a long read, and you may find it, shall we say, overbearing. And I would like to assure you that it is not the case.)

I appreciate the Moodle community's effort, and I really appreciate what you are doing with Overflow. (And I am not saying this just to be nice and polite; I really mean it.)

However, please let me explain what I find to be a fundamental flaw with the way Moodle itself and its plugins are developed.

The whole concept of "application scenario" or "use case", through which we basically try to guess/imagine/envisage how teachers/managers/etc will use the activities, is somewhat flawed. The truth is, at best, we "may" only be able to come up with a rough estimate of what "we think" the possible use cases will be.

Now this poor teacher would say... why bother? Why not just try to make our tool as robust and as versatile as possible so that educators can use it more effectively as they see fit with ingenuity and in scenarios that we and even they had not previously imagined?

That's why I advocate always providing as many features as possible (with setting options to activate/deactivate obviously) to enable users to adapt Moodle to their own scenarios, which could be partially or radically different from what we had imagined. Simply put: do not try to second-guess your users!

That's how technology should work. We make the best tools we can. It's not us but the users who will find ways to use and apply it. Yes, we do have some idea as how the tech should be used and applied but we understand that the best way to get the best out of our tech is to make it versatile.

Just imagine what would have happened if the the inventor of the wheel had decided that the "application scenario" is for carts and not anything else, such as mills. ;-)

So to reply to your question, I would like to see:

1. The students being required to start a certain number of discussions/posts before "qualifying" for a grade.

2. Given the above, the teacher should then be able to choose "any or all" of the following grading methods:

A. A "whole forum" grade decided by the teacher.

B. The teacher grading individual posts and an average being calculated as the whole forum grade.

C. The grade being calculated based on reputation points, with a minimum passing grade and a maximum grade set by the teacher.

D. Other possibilities I haven't even thought of... 😉

I know this may appear as a bit of an overkill but if you have read my rant above, you will know why.

[NinaHerrmann]

@pejhab Please also read that, having in mind, that I am really trying to make a contribution to the open source community with limited resources. I am happy to work in this area, and happy about your engagement, but I am also motivated to optimize the output(value to the open source community) with limited resources available!

The truth is, at best, we "may" only be able to come up with a rough estimate of what "we think" the possible use cases will be.

Absolutely agree. But there are more certain estimates and not so likely use cases. In an ideal world all are implemented. But If I only have x hours a day I have to decide for the feature which will most likely be used.

That's why I advocate always providing as many features as possible

Sure, if you give me x programmers and pay them I will let them develop all features but boils down to the same finding - with limited resources we decide for "important" features.

I can understand your arguments, but I hope you can understand why prioritizing features (to the best of our knowledge) is indispensable for developing features.

Apart from that, thank you for your proposals!

• The students being required to start a certain number of discussions/posts before "qualifying" for a grade. - Sounds good to me
• Given the above, the teacher should then be able to choose "any or all" of the following grading methods:
  • "whole forum" grade decided by the teacher. - Sounds reasonable
  • The teacher grading individual posts and an average being calculated as the whole forum grade. - Sounds hard to implement
  • The grade being calculated based on reputation points, with a minimum passing grade and a maximum grade set by the teacher. - Also rather hard

[pejhab]

Touché! :-) You certainly have a valid point.

My suggestion/rant was rather about the overall approach.

To help me better understand the situation, could you tell me how your plugin was developed? Which was the starting point, Moodle forum or stackexchange/stackoverflow type forum.

Thank you again for the great work you and your coworkers are doing.

[NinaHerrmann]

Haha. I can understand having random rants. I appreciate the honest feedback!

The original starting point was Stackoverflow (of course big fans!). As we are limited in time the initial development was part of a bachelor thesis. Afterwards we extended it by feedback we are getting from conferences, our university, and of course github issues ;). I know this is not a elaborate evaluation, but for most of our plugins it works "okay"...

Regarding the origin of this issue - I fear we put it in the backlog compared to #136 #135 and #134. And of course the inline editor ...
But I have it in my mind!

[pejhab]

Hats off to you and the team! :-)