How does the Topics Course Format remember the last state per user? Moodle Community to the rescue.

And how do you cause it to "forget" the last state? Here's how! Read on.

An expert and authority on Course Formats, Gareth J Barnard, replied.

Here's the hack code that does the job of stopping persistance in all Topics courses:

Edit 'format.php' in the  '/course/format/topics' folder and change the code from:

if ($topic != -1) {
   $displaysection = course_set_display($course->id, $topic);
} else {
   $displaysection = course_get_display($course->id);
}

to

if ($topic != -1) {
    $displaysection = $topic;
} else {
    $displaysection = 0;
}

And once again, thanks to the unsung heroes and kind Moodle Community, another stuck programmer is rescued and a teething programming problem is solved. Don't you just LOVE the Moodle Community?

Happy Moodling
Frankie Kam

Three ways to disable the "Show only one topic / Show all topics" icon in Moodle 1.9

Ever had this need?

In a topics-format course, the "Show only topic N" and "Show all topics" icons present a usability issue. Students who inadvertently click on them become confused when they lose sight of the the other blocks. It would be good if we could disable these icons, either at System or Course level, or perhaps through a new capability.
(John Isner from this Moodle tracker).

In this post I want to present FOUR ways of disabling the "Show only week N" icon

and its sibling, the "Show all weeks" icon.

Tweak your forum so that it shows ALL posts of a specific user made in the same forum. For Moodle 1.9

I dare say that the forum activity in Moodle is a hotbed of ideas and student engagement. For students who love to share their ideas, the forum will be a frequently used resource. Today, I came across this interesting and very useful tweak by Tony Hursh that dates back to 2008. Tony's patch will make a teacher's life easier to track who posted what on a specific forum. This is especially useful in popular forums where there is much debate, views and repartee going back and forth among students.

Learning Outcome
At the end of this post you will gain access to the patch code that allows you to click a link and display all forum posts made by a specific student within one specific forum.

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.