Resources for using Discourse in the classroom

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Is anyone using Discourse while teaching university-level courses? If yes, would you mind sharing your experience (what works well, what’s missing)? Are there perhaps resources with recommendations about setting up Discourse for such a use?

I am looking for the following features:

  1. Distinguish between students and instructors.
  2. Students should be able to post in a way that they are anonymous to each other, but their name is visible to instructors. When multiple anonymous users post in the same topic, they should be distinguishable from each other, but ideally not trackable across different topics.
  3. Students should be able to private-message instructors collectively, or a private-message a single instructor. Control over whether students can private-message each other would be a plus.
  4. An easy way to set up several forums based on a template, and hosted on the same domain. This is necessary so that creating forums for each class in each semester is easy and convenient.
  5. It would be a plus to be able to partition students into “sections” and write messages that are visible to only some sections.
  6. It would be a plus to be able to write announcements and override students’ email settings on a per-announcement basis (making sure that they receive an email notification).
  7. It would be a plus to be able to download the current list of registered users (name + email) in a machine-readable format (e.g. CSV) for easy cross checking with the list of registered students. (I do believe this is possible.)
  8. It would be a plus to be able to “archive” forums after the semester has ended: keep the content in read-only mode, prevent new sign-ups and posts.
  9. Some features that encourage (or even enforce) using full names would be a big plus.
  10. Not strictly necessary, but some sort of LMS integration might be nice, especially if it can automate account creation.

Confirmation on whether each of these features is / isn’t available would be useful.

Does Discourse offer hosting plans specifically for use in teaching? I am unable to see any at Discourse pricing | Discourse - Civilized Discussion. The requirements of such a use are a bit different than what the standard plans offer: Forums would always be private, active only for the duration of one semester with up to 300 users, and then kept around in read-only mode for a reasonable amount of time (maybe 2-3 years or so).

At the moment we use a forum system that is specialized for academic use / teaching. However, I am frustrated with the poor math support it has. I have used Discourse in non-academic contexts, and I love the good math support, convenient search and organization, and the ability to set up a Q/A-like format.

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Hi szhorvat I’ve answered the questions I can from your list hope you find it helpful :wink:

Have a look at changing the colour of Instructor usernames or adding a tile etc. you can find a guide on how to do this here.

Can’t you just create a category for each semester or something then create groups which can only create/reply/see that specific category?

In the /admin/users/list/active there is an ‘Export button’

There is the full name required site setting

I’m quoting this from the Discourse.org website

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That’s easy with group flair.

I don’t know of a way to do that in Discourse; it’s not immediately clear how a plugin would be able to do that.

Oh, or maybe this is so simple that the answer didn’t occur to me. Students just don’t use their real names in the name field when they create their account and you have a staff-only user-custom-field that has their real name in it.

that’s possible with PMs.

This is something that every LMS I"ve seen does really badly.

My solution when I used Discourse for my classes was to have a read-only category with the class assignments and had students reply-as-linked-topic with their responses in their semester’s category. I think I then created a syllabus topic with a calendar and links to the assignments with due-dates. I think that the new documentation plugin might might this even easier.

You could use sub-categories for the sub-groups and either enforce who can see them with more groups or just tell students which one to participate in and have it be OK if people looked at other sub-groups.

The data-explorer plugin does this.

You’d just change the category permissions.

But above you’re afraid that people will see each other’s names? But yes, you can have a user-custom-field that is required.

I think it should be possible to make discourse-connect authenticate against your LMS.

Back when I was using Discourse to teach my classes, I had a script that took a CSV from the LMS, looked for topics for each student that had been tagged appropriately and if I had “liked” the topic gave them a pass on the assignment and updated the CSV, which could then uploaded back to the LMS’s grading system.

I don’t think that they do, but I might. I’m a former educational technology professor. If you have any budget at all, please contact me.

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