Feature Request: Add a mode with deferred response function

[berb]

I'd really appreciate to have an additional mode in which students can ask and rate questions, but can not yet answer questions up to a certain date. After that deadline, the activity switches back to the normal mode in which all users can provide answers.

Here is our user story for this feature request: We would like students to collect questions in a flipped classroom setting. The questions are then discussed later in a live Q&A session (e.g., classroom lecture, live video stream). Therefore, we want the students to collect interesting questions via Moodle overflow – asking own questions and/or voting on the questions suggested by others. The activity implicitly gives the teacher a list of asked questions, and also the relevance based on the votings. These questions can then be discussed and answered in the live session, independently from Moodle overflow. After the corresponding deadline, the activity switches back to normal mode so that both the teacher can provide the answer from the live event as text, but also students can suggest alternatives or additions. Using such a two-phase approach, we would like to prevent premature answers by others students that might discourage the participation in the live event, but benefit from the initial question collection and voting of Moodle overflow.

To clarify further, the mode would support a configurable deadline which splits the activity into two phases.

• Phase 1: Anyone can submit questions and vote on existing questions. In addition, teachers should already be able to answer questions, if needed.
• Phase 2: Answers and discussions enabled for all users.

[justusdieckmann]

Hi @berb,

thanks for your feature request! I think there is already a way to do that. The permission mod/moodleoverflow:replypost specifically permits answering posts. So you can create a moodleoverflow activity, specifically remove the replypost permission from the student role for that activity, and give it back once the live event is over. Having an extra deadline settings would of course be more elegant, but (correct me if I'm wrong) since this seems like a acceptable solution for this specific use case, I'd say we'll probably not add it as a seperate feature for now.

Greetings, Justus

[berb]

Hi @justusdieckmann ,

thanks for your response. The workaround that you have described is exactly what we are doing right now. However, there is an organizational issue, at least for our setup (but I guess this might apply to other users, too): Being a lecturer at my university, I am only an "end-user" and don't have elevated rights to change permissions at that level. This means that I neeed to contact the administator of our Moodle instance for each moodleoverflow instance where I need this feature.

That said, a built-in feature for deferred response would definitively be a more elegant solution and would highly increase its practicability. Though, I understand that this feature request will likely not have a high priority given the other issues.

Best, Benjamin

[abias]

Hey @justusdieckmann ,

I would like to second what @berb said. In fact, I asked him to create this issue because of the fact that the possibility to modify roles is disabled for teachers in our Moodle instance for good reasons (especially to keep problem reports of teachers reproducible and to stop them from fiddling with capability and breaking things in their course).

Cheers, Alex

[NinaHerrmann]

Hey @berb, I think this might be a good first issue. However, as you said it is not on top of our priority list. Thanks for submitting an issue! Cheers, Nina

[NinaHerrmann]

We started working on it :wink: