Reward students for forum posts of N number of words or more with the Verbosity mod for Moodle 1.9!

The Verbosity mod for Moodle 1.9 was written by Paweł Suwiński of Poland in January 2012. This is so far the only mod that I know that awards a Moodle Gradebook score to a student based on forum posts made by the student. 

Figure 0. I write, therefore I am.

Learning Outcome

• At the end of this post, you will know how to use Verbosity to award scores based on the quantity of forum posts made by a student for a specific forum. 
• You will also know how to customise Verbosity so that only the  student who puts in some effort to type words and paragraphs in a forum post will have a score. For example, students who write 200-word posts will, deservedly, be rewarded. On the other hand, students who type, for example, five word sentences will not have any score in their Moodle Gradebook. Well that's the gist of it.

Figure 1. A typical Moodle forum

Note: to know how to add a word count data 

to a forum post, see my other post here.

How to use the humble comma delimited (CSV) file to display private coursework marks right on your Moodle coursepage

Today's post is about a crude but effective method to display confidential user coursework data on any Moodle 1.9.x course page. All you need is the Display Data mod (created by Serafim Panov) and an Excel spreadsheet saved as a CSV (comma delimited) file. You can even dispense with Excel and just use good old Notepad to create the CSV file!

Do you like to use Excel to store your students' coursework marks? Like this?

Would you like to feedback the detailed marks to your online-Moodle students, but are concerned about privacy issues?

If replied "yes!" to both questions, then boy oh boy, do I have a treat for you. It's a Moodle treat from 2007 and it's really very simple to use.