Is there any way to restrict posting in a topic to members of a group, but allow all users to read the topic?

[maiki]

Thanks for elaborating.

@Daniel_McQuillen

This forces the student understand why there’s a top level category and then one subcategory level for the “Course Topics” (that’s the one for their cohort), and another for “General Discussion” (that’s the one for all cohorts in a course) … and if they click around they might get a bit lost.

Sometimes cohorts are more of an admin grouping mechanism not something the student cares about, so that can make this cat/subcat thing a bit more confusing. “Why isn’t there just one category for all the topics in the course?”

I hear what you are saying, although I think I would personally name the cohorts and provide a space specifically for that cohort. Even if it was something like, Spring 2024a and Spring 2024b, to distinguish.

You must be naming groups already, and that makes me wonder: do the cohorts require a private category? Could you share all the material as PMs to the cohort group, instead? I suppose that depends on how you are using the API to embed the discussions in the LMS.

@Daniel_McQuillen

Plus as I mentioned before this setup means we need to duplicate all topics anytime a cohort is created, delete that subset when a cohort is deleted, or update every subcategory when a topic is created/updated/deleted.

There are a lot of ways to look at this one, but I think at some point you should look into automating content creation for new cohorts. I’m not sure how you are going to get around that one, given your model.

I am super lazy believe in the power of web linking! So if I were creating materials in Discourse I would create personal message templates to send to groups that begin like…

Hello, and welcome to the Moderation unit!

We will go over the tools we have available to help us keep our communities healthy, and then open it up for questions and discussion.

Please review Discourse Moderation Guide, and then share which of these features in Discourse have been used in your community, and which concepts were new to you.

In this case, the reading material is a public topic, and one place to maintain the content. All the cohort topics essentially contain one or more links, and just enough content to begin the discussion. For example.

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I don’t have any suggestions for you beyond that at this time, but using Discourse for group learning is an interest of mine, and I’m always learning new things from the community and our customers.