Abilty to organize questions by modules (or chapters/units), not purely by time
I love Packback but I'm really struggling with the inability to have different modules separated so all posts are on the same unit/topic.
I need an option that is module-based instead of time-based. I have students who work ahead and students who occasionally get behind and it's very hard to follow the threads (especially if students don't label the threads with the unit/chapter they are working on).
I have found that my students sometimes have tremendous non cognitive barriers to their success and some need individualized success plans. There are others who work ahead at times to meet their needs. Anyone who is slightly off of the time frame can really get lost. As a partial solution, it's very helpful to have students label all of their posts (questions and responses).
Comments: 9
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17 Jan, '20
Jessica Tenuta AdminThank you so much for this feedback. It sounds like you need a solution that gives you more flexibility in creating more customized learning plans for students, and being able to more easily accommodate late/early/adjusted work for students, and modules has allowed you to do that in other systems. Our team will be considering ways to better support this need for learning plan individualization and late work management.
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23 Jan, '20
Curtis Schroeder MergedFrom week-to-week, it would be helpful to functionally (and visually) categorize the posts from a given module / week / deadline / etc. so students (and faculty) can review the topics and discussion that were relevant based on some bounded timeline / ideas. This will be helpful on a discussion-by-discussion basis, and in review for exams and ongoing comprehension.
This could come to life through multiple tabs that open up an organized stream for that category (Module 1, Module 2, etc.) or a l -
24 Feb, '20
Jessica Tenuta Admin"Create way to organize or categorize posts by module / week / deadline / etc." (suggested by Curtis Schroeder on 2020-01-23), including upvotes (1) and comments (0), was merged into this suggestion.
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25 Feb, '20
Steve SharpI strongly support this suggestions. Module-based instead of time-based works best for my courses. Not every topic can neatly be squeezed into a week -- some require less time, others more. Module-based assignments also allow students to get credit for work on a topic that they complete later.
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07 May, '20
MelissaI was hoping for more separation between units rather than just the one long feed to scroll through. It was suggested to add Unit X as a preface to each post but when students forgot I would have to go looking to see what unit they were discussing. This was a complaint of several students that it felt unorganized when they went to respond to the posts of peers.
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22 Sep, '20
Jenifer EversBeing able to organize posts into modules/chapters would make my life & student' SO much easier. I love the quality of the posts, but am not sure it's worth the 5.5 hours I spend grading each week. I have to look up each student every week to see that they posted an initial question as well as two responses each week because students work at their own pace in my online courses .It is nothing short of cumbersome with regards to grading. Dealbreaker.
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10 Feb, '21
Rita MitraThis would be a very beneficial feature! Something akin to Slack channels for modules/topics would be very helpful to students to organize the content and reduce the noise.
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09 Mar, '21
Jason Kenji HigaI support this idea - I think this could easily be done if a clever engineer could use text mining/analytics to cluster or group posts by topics, e.g., an algorithm that uses tf-idf in combination with k-means clustering.
This clustering can be done in an unsupervised fashion where an AI script can compare all posts in a classroom and generate suggested "topics" that can be presented to instructors, who can then label/rename them.
Or...there could be a supervised learning version where a professor can label posts with a topic/chapter, and an AI script can use the labeled posts as a training set to identify unlabeled posts with similar content/topics.
If someone on the engineering team is familiar with data mining techniques, I'm sure they could probably get a prototype of this running in a week. -
03 Feb, '22
Kristie CampanaI agree with what's said here. I do modules, which typically do take about a week, but I think a constant feed becomes overwhelming and leads to students commenting on posts not relevant to the current topic. Having ways to archive older discussions or provide tabs would help this be less overwhelming.