Hi there. I work for a university in IT. We’d like to create private discourse categories (which would map to courses), where only members of the course and the instructors would have access.
Wondering if anyone else is doing this currently and could share their experiences. Thanks!
@pfaffman is your man…
Given the quality of the forums included in the LMSes I’ve had the misfortune to be exposed to over the years, Discourse would be an intergalactic leap forward in user experience.
We’ve got plenty of educational institutions amongst our hosted customer base, although I don’t see any obviously listed on our customers page. I’d be surprised if some of them weren’t using Discourse as a course discussion system. Hopefully one or more admins from those sites hang around here and can add their thoughts.
We’re currently doing this for multiple courses.
We have two approaches that both seem to work out:
For a mathematics preparatory course, we have one permanent Discourse instance that we re-use every year. This makes sense for us, because the course is organized by a team of volunteers, and there is both a large overlap between two consecutive years’ teams, and often a bit to discuss between courses. We archive and tag all topics before the preparations for a new course start. You can read a bit about my journey to do this here:
For other courses, we use one Discourse instance for each iteration. So far, we’ve been simply shutting them down in the end, but in the future, I want to use multisite so I can keep the old instances running without causing significant additional load.
We use a custom course management system that manages submissions, grades, exams and so on. This CMS has a built-in phpBB-based forum, but also supports Discourse SSO – so in the courses where we use Discourse, the “Forum” link in the CMS simply triggers an SSO login to the (login required) Discourse instance for this course. The Discourse instance has a site customization which adds a navigation bar on top, allowing you to get back to the CMS.
I’m sure one large Discourse instance with subcategories could work too, but we’ve made a really good experience with our one-instance-per-course approach.
I’d be happy to answer any questions you have 
Hi, Jeff. I was once an instructional technology professor in colleges of education. In my last gig, I taught my classes with Discourse (which is part of why I now make my living with Discourse).
I organized assignments (or quests) in read-only categories and instructed students to reply-as-linked-topic (now on the link icon below a post) and put their post into the category for their class with a particular tag for that assignment. This made it easy for students to comment on each others work and for me to see whether students had done the work. I would 
their topic if they had completed the assignment, and wrote a script that would see that students had done the assignment and gave different grades if I had liked it and if other students had. It’s probably not helpful, but you can have it.
Having the assignments in their own categories made it easy to re-run a course and to use an assignment in multiple courses. The other cool thing is that when it was obvious that an assignment was badly worded or otherwise needed changing, I could change it immediately, making life better for the slackers who did the work late, and meaning that all those changes to assignments that I might otherwise have intended to do before next semester were, in fact, done.
You can see a syllabus for the last class I taught and this one too. This also worked really well, since the assignments were separate from the course, there wasn’t the copy-the-old-course-to-the-new-one at the start of each semester. All that was needed was to copy the syllabus and change the dates on it.
My courses were all (and remained for a time) public. Changing that is just a matter of changing the permissions on the categories, though. I think that I just put a link to the course in the school’s LMS to get people to sign up. You could use groups to invite students to the course and control access.
Thank, all, for the info! Very helpful.
Still getting our feet wet with the tool, but leaning toward making each course a private category (or maybe sub-category?), with permissions granted to a group that contains the students, instructors, and TAs for that course.
We could be running hundreds of courses each semester, which means we’d end up with loads of (private) categories. That could eventually be a problem for us, as it looks like there could be issues with having much more than 1000 categories (?), based on what I’m seeing in this topic:
So perhaps we’d need to archive these off at some point…but we’re not going to hit that limit overnight.
We’d definitely need to bump up the default character limit for group names to accommodate unique names for courses/sections, and it looks like this is doable. Hurray!
@pfaffman thanks for sending along your examples! We’ll give those a closer look and let you know what questions come up. And thanks, @fefrei for sharing how you’re approaching this at your institution. Plenty to think about!
Totally agree with you, @mpalmer!
We’d eventually like to look at creating an LTI integration:
https://www.imsglobal.org/activity/learning-tools-interoperability
…but one step at a time. 
你好，Jay，我尝试查看这些链接，但不幸收到了“此连接不私密”的提示。您是否仍然可以展示您是如何安排课程的？我正在探索是否可以在 Discourse 上托管课程大纲，类似于 Thinkific 等平台。
是的，我让那个网站停运了，现在我觉得有比当时更好的方法来实现我的目标。
不过，我认为将一系列主题（也就是你们所说的“作业”）放在只读分类中，然后让人们在某个分类下创建主题并提交他们的“答案”，同时用标签标明对应的作业，这种方案是可行的。如果能配合一个主题来优化用户体验就更好了。
此外，还有一些技巧可以创建链接来发起新主题，这或许会有所帮助。
我最大的困扰是无法对某个分类下的主题进行排序。按顺序完成一门课程，并在视觉上逐一勾选每个课程元素，这种感觉非常令人满足。我在想是否可以实现这一点。另外，我在考虑是否可以通过一个主题组件，在主题列表页面上显示用户已喜欢某个主题，因为这可能是利用现有功能实现“一目了然”地完成主题这一满足感的最简单方式。或者，能否添加一个侧边栏？非常期待大家的建议。
以下是 Thinkific 用户体验的截图：
双栏布局
左上角
右栏
这里有一篇关于如何保持主题顺序的讨论，但看起来只是一种不够理想的变通方案。
我也考虑过这一点，最终我让一个主题（topic）充当课程主页，而不是使用分类。这样我就可以通过目录来按照自己的喜好进行结构化。
是的，我也在考虑这个问题。你做了什么特别的操作来确保那个主题易于查找或保持可见吗？有什么想法吗？我目前的想法如下：
想法 #1：将课程主页主题结构化为清单。使用 https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-reply-template-component/162373，让学生创建自己的清单。教导他们将该主题加入书签或分配给自己，以便更容易找到。这样一来，他们的个人课程主题也可以作为学习日志，在其中回复反思等内容。
想法 #2：在分类描述中添加指向课程主页主题的链接，并使用众多分类横幅主题组件之一（例如 Pavilion
想法 #3：创建一个课程主页主题，然后使用侧边栏组件（如 https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-category-sidebars/107561），或通过 Layouts Plugin 自行编写代码。但如果有人通过移动设备访问课程怎么办？这些侧边栏组件似乎都没有让他们在移动设备上轻松查看。
这帮助我梳理了课程可能需要的功能：
我的方案没那么复杂，我只是列了清单，用待办清单标记任务，并用回复组件进行入职引导。你可以在这里看到我的示例：https://community.growthclinic.xyz/t/start-here-business-growth-thinkers/63?u=osioke。
我喜欢将分类设为只读的想法，但我想先观察人们如何与这些课程互动，因为它们是公开且自学的。
我超爱看实例！感谢分享！
我注意到在每个主题下，你还将内容拆分到了回复帖子中。
我喜欢让人们能够回复主题的想法，但或许他们不应自行创建新主题。
是的，我这样做是为了将内容拆分成易于消化的片段，有点像幻灯片中的内容。
我所做的是按照建议，将某个主题作为教学大纲。由于在我的课程中，学生们遵循相同的进度安排，我会对内容进行压缩或扩展，以便更容易找到当前周的信息。
我还使用了自定义徽章来跟踪学生的完成情况。每项作业（在我的课程术语中称为“挑战”）都关联了一个标签，因此当他们使用相应标签发帖时（我想，我还需要“点赞”该主题），他们就会获得徽章。我可以通过这些徽章来追踪他们完成了哪些作业。我编写了一个脚本，该脚本会查找对应的徽章，并更新电子表格中的单元格，之后我可以直接将数据上传到学习管理系统（LMS）的成绩册中。
哇！这是自动化的吗？
嗯，从某种意义上说是“自动化”的。我想我当时大概是先从 LMS 下载了某个文件，然后运行了一个脚本，检查徽章（或是主题？）是否存在，如果用户已完成相应任务，就标记为“全额学分”，之后再把文件上传回 LMS。这套系统并不是我指望其他人会使用的，至少当时的情况如此。不过那已经是很久以前的事了，现在的 API 和我的技能水平都大不相同了。
不过，徽章部分确实是自动化的。编写授予徽章的 SQL 语句并不难（你需要是自托管部署，或者使用允许创建自定义徽章 SQL 的计划）。但自动化接口或许是实现这一功能的另一种途径。
有人找到将 Discourse Comments 用于 Thinkific Lessons 的方法吗？我们目前正在迁移到 Thinkfiic，并想知道如何像 WP Discourse 那样将课程与主题联系起来。
您应该能够通过 Javascript 在其他网站上嵌入 Discourse 评论 (Embed Discourse comments on another website via Javascript)。
您正在从什么迁移？Thinkific 提供了什么而 Discourse 无法提供？
