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Moodle enables you to use a scale to rate student's work. A scale offers you something other than a grade to give the student as feedback. Scales can be used to rate forum postings, assignment submissions, and glossary entries. The following screenshot shows a feedback on the relevance of a posting, given in a custom scale by a teacher:
To create and apply a custom scale, follow these steps:
Users with the roles Administrator, Course creator, and Teacher can create custom scales.
Users with the role Administrator, Course creator, or Teacher can split a discussion. When you split a discussion at a post, the selected post and the ones below become a new topic.
Note that you cannot take a few posts from the middle of a topic and split them into a new discussion. Splitting takes every post that is nested below the selected one and puts it into a new topic.
Before the split
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After the split
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Topic 1 Reply 1-1 Reply 1-2 Reply 1-2-1 Reply 1-2-2 Reply 1-2-3 Reply 1-3 Reply 1-4 Reply 1-4-1 Reply 1-4-2
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New Topic 1-2 Reply 1-2-1 Reply 1-2-2 Reply 1-2-3 Topic 1 Reply 1-1 Reply 1-3 Reply 1-4 Reply 1-4-1 Reply 1-4-2
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Splitting a thread can rescue a conversation that has gotten off topic. However, it can also change the meaning of the conversation in ways that you don't expect or want.
Note that in the preceding example, after the split, the new topic is moved to the top of the forum. Will that change the meaning of your forum? Let's look at an example. Following is the screenshot showing the fi rst topic in a forum on the October Revolution of Russian history. In this topic, students discuss whether the revolution was a coup or a popular uprising:
The teacher made the first posting and several students have posted replies. Some of these replies, as shown in the following screenshot, favor the theory that the revolution was a coup, while others favor the theory of revolution being a popular uprising:
Note that the posting by Student2 is a reply(Re) to the posting by Student1. You might have missed that because the reply is not indented. That's because the teacher has selected Display replies flat, with oldest first. If the teacher had selected Display replies in nested form, you would see Student2's reply indented, or nested, under Student1's reply. We can tell that Student2 is replying to Student1 because the subject line indicates it is a reply to Student1 (Re: My vote: popular uprising).
The first two postings are pro-uprising. The last posting is pro-coup. It occurs to the teacher that it would facilitate discussion to split the forum into pro-uprising and pro-coup topics.
The teacher scrolls down to the pro-coup posting, which just happens to be the last posting in this forum, and clicks on Split, as shown in following screenshot:
This will make a new topic out of the pro-coup posting:
In this example, the teacher was lucky. Under the pro-coup posting, there were no pro-uprising replies. If there were, those replies would have come with the pro-coup posting, and the teacher would not have been able to make a topic that was completely pro-coup.