Does anyone have any tips, pointers or links for how to configure users in myBB for education? (or should I post this to another forum? - I have a lot of experience with other systems but just getting started with myBB.)
I 'm setting up myBB for use with teachers, assistants and students, and am looking for any advice on how to set up users to fulfill these roles.
specifically, I am probably looking at setting up forums for a number of courses, each with teachers, and possibly teaching assistants that would have similar permissions as teachers. each forum for a given course will need to be walled off from other courses, I would need a way to batch add people to these roles if possible.
What would be the most efficient way to set all this up, because potentailly there are going to be several hundred users that will need to book into the system and set up during at the start of any given semester.
Are teachers and TAs essentailly moderators? or what?
thanks for any advice about any of this!
Gordon
I've done something similar to this.
Pretty much I stripped down MyBB to be very basic.
I then made all teachers moderators. We didn't have student access for registering, just guess access.
Principals became admins.
Hey, thanks Lyndon, that helps!
(2010-12-30, 02:59 AM)Lyndon D. Wrote: [ -> ]I then made all teachers moderators. We didn't have student access for registering, just guess access.
Principals became admins.
well, students are going to need to register and delete their own posts. We can't have anonymous students!
Surely myBB must be used somewhere in large scale educational settings...
(2010-12-30, 03:40 AM)Gordon Wrote: [ -> ]Hey, thanks Lyndon, that helps!
(2010-12-30, 02:59 AM)Lyndon D. Wrote: [ -> ]I then made all teachers moderators. We didn't have student access for registering, just guess access.
Principals became admins.
well, students are going to need to register and delete their own posts. We can't have anonymous students!
Surely myBB must be used somewhere in large scale educational settings...
You can register each student with there full name, then password as some random number then edit the register members permission to what you want. Teachers Moderators, higher classes admins.
Just curious, at the start of a semester when new students are booked in to a course, what happens to the old threads/posts in that forum possibly from previous semesters? Do they get deleted or archived?
Anyway, while this can be done I see it taking quite a bit of setup.
How I would do it is to setup the course forums, assign the teachers and TAs as moderators of that forum.
Next you create a usergroup for that course, and assign the permissions for the course forum to allow view/post etc to only that group and hide it from the other groups.
Do this for all the other courses.
Now just move the students around to the usergroup of the course you want them to access
The only obstacle I foresee with the above is if a student needs to be in more than one course, then it complicates things.
Might need to do some plugin edits to allow the users to be apart of more than 2 groups.
(2010-12-30, 03:56 AM)- G33K - Wrote: [ -> ]Just curious, at the start of a semester when new students are booked in to a course, what happens to the old threads/posts in that forum possibly from previous semesters? Do they get deleted or archived?
The only obstacle I foresee with the above is if a student needs to be in more than one course, then it complicates things.
well, yes, we'd want to archive off previous semesters forums, most likely.
this is fantastic information - thank you so much!
Yes, students would probably need to be members of multiple courses, so that might an issue we'd have to address.
Ideally, we'd like teachers to be able to actually create forums within their own courses, at their discretion. There is no way for a moderator to do that now, is there? It requires admin rights?
So really, there is probably a need for a plugin to handle an application like this - and it looks like it could have several useful features for easing the set up and admin.
There must be institutions that are using myBB, or would like to. Perhaps there are opportunities there...
(2010-12-30, 04:13 AM)Lyndon D. Wrote: [ -> ]Might need to do some plugin edits to allow the users to be apart of more than 2 groups.
yeah, I was thinking this is going to require some custom mod to allow the features I'm going to need.
Actually you can give teachers part of admin power so they can only make forums in the admin cp.
At our school we use Edmodo.com which is a "Social Network" for Schools.
(2010-12-30, 05:59 AM)Lyndon D. Wrote: [ -> ]At our school we use Edmodo.com which is a "Social Network" for Schools.
Interesting site. So, do you have a local copy of that, or you use that as a service? There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that education needs to be more involved in activities like that.
I'm doing my PhD in Ed. Tech, and I have a project going creating structured discussion forums - modding myBB to accommodate this concept - so that rather than replies being open, replies are guided by a set structure or schema of reply types. This can be used to guide discussion for a number of purposes, for example to guide arguments, or debates, or scientific discourse. Right now I am in the midst of creating the schema authoring system so that teachers can create their own discussion structure and and apply it to any myBB forum or thread. So, for example, in the case of guiding an argument, a teacher might create a starter post in a thread, and the possible replies to a starter post might be a claim, and a counterclaim. In turn, a claim might be replied to with evidence, and likewise a counterclaim's replies might be restricted to a rebuttal or evidence.
The authoring system is looking pretty slick right now, and everything works perfectly in myBB - thank god for such a flexible and open system. I wish I could show it to you but I have shut down the discussion board for the moment to iron out some of the security issues, and to enhance the features.
So I am looking ahead to the future, anticipating that I will be using this live in courses I teach, as well as other teachers who are interested in structured discussion research.