17 November 2011, 2:55

Hi All,

A student has been removing the lecturers comments and feedback for their page (they have been told not to so EV’s/IV’s(external/Internal verifiers) etc. can see the communication line between the two.

Is there anyway to disable this to stop students from removing page comments? And even better a way to find that comment again?

Its 1.4 and it’s a mahoodle integration?

Thanks

John

18 November 2011, 8:30

I'd like to know this too.

John, if it helps, as far as I am aware, the person who left the feedback should have been emailed to say feedback "such and such" has been deleted, so you shouldn't have to recover it.

However, it would be good if we could stop the students deleting the feedback in the first place.

Thanks

22 November 2011, 4:57

Hi Wullie and John,

I had a talk to Francois about this yesterday. It is a rather tricky one to deal with from a "users have control over their own portfolio" viewpoint.

If anything was to be done to prevent people removing comments on things in their own portfolios, it would need to take into consideration a varying number of factors (who, what, why, what restrictions, the scope of the restrictions, who gets any moderation workload, etc) and be structured very carefully so as to not cause other issues, and that could mean a fair bit of time spent drawing up the change specification and the development.

While it is a complicated issue and we can't promise anything, we are happy to continue discussing how to improve Mahara in ways that balance the needs of the varied users it has. Please do continue discussing this issue and offering suggestions for what you feel are appropriate ways to implement this that mitigates the situation while avoiding disruption it could potentially cause both other students and teachers.

Thanks,
Melissa

22 November 2011, 6:19

Hi melissa/Wullie,

this seems to be a common problem, i like the fact users have control of their own portfolio but when using it in an education setting some restrictions must be in place.

it might be an idea when the users select the 'create page' link they are promted with a box that asks is it an education page or a personal page (education pages have certain restrictions i.e. not remove comments and the person page has no restrictions) this could be a feature for 5.0?

when a user removes a comment the site admin should still have the rights to see the removed comment and reinstate it if necessary. What happens if a lecturer places feedback on a page throught a year then when a Verifier for the course comes in to see the communication link between lecturer and student and its been removed by the student? It in a way makes the system very fawled and will actually stop lecturers from using it if students start removing comments.aaa

If comments can be removed then this is a risk that education insitutions (like my College) cannot afford to take. Feedback is vital in assessing working so why remove it (unless of course it's negative feedback). Hopfully my point makes sense and you can add something into v5.0 to stop this from happening.

thanks

John Kerr

22 November 2011, 7:34

John,

I agree with what you have written and in lieu of any better suggestion from me, your educational/personal page idea seems like a good idea.

One of my lecturers has been adding feedback on the students placement diaries that the placement supervisors can view and update also.

One of the students has removed some of the feedback entered by the lecturer so that the supervisor can't see what was written (this was basically "you're falling behind, work harder"), which I can understand the student wanting to do, but as John says, does not accurately reflect the communication and learning progress/process between student and lecturer.

Also, as pointed out by John, the aforementioned lecturer is unlikely to want to use it again (or indeed bother leaving any feedback), if this can just be removed by the students.

Thanks

27 November 2011, 19:45

Hi John and Wullie,

We had a lengthy discussion about feedback during the planning phase of the new feedback a couple of years ago: http://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=1012 There is some reasoning for doing it a certain way or having other options to still keep it out of too much teacher control. Centering some rights around the staff role may already solve some things.

I don't think that all options were implemented in the end. I couldn't see that staff feedback is not deleted, but maybe I didn't wait long enough right now.

Cheers

Kristina

28 November 2011, 5:20

Hi Kristina,

Thanks for the info. I've had a look at the discussions and i see that in 2009 some people hadthe same concerns that Wullie and I face.
It seems that the decission was made not to allow restrictions to be in place to stop students from deleting feedback to keep in favour of student ownership.

I agree that students should ahve ownership of their page, however, lecturers use Mahara for the feedabck option (both private and puiblic) and with students cheery picking the bad comments to delete is pretty much causing concern with the academics and rightly so.

Surely Mahara should adapt this for academic use and respond to user feedback or once this happens in other Colleges/Universities the 'keen' staff will stop using it in fear of their communication line being deleted with no way of reinstating it.

I have to say this is a major issue i feel has been overlooked for asome reason.

John

28 November 2011, 13:08

Hello John,

As far as I read Richard's post from September 21, a tutor feedback would only be hidden, i.e. private, but not entirely deleted. I'll talk to him and see what the current implementation is.

Cheers

Kristina

28 November 2011, 15:00

Hi John,

Mahara has big limitations on the assessment side - it's never really been the primary purpose of the software, and the simple group submission/release process is pretty well all you get at the moment.  To add to what's on the other thread, I think it'd be reasonable to add a site option to Mahara that would stop users deleting comments by staff or administrators.  It's harder to come up with a good policy when the commenter is a group tutor, because once a page is 'released', there's no longer any association between the page and the group (the owner may even leave the group).  I suppose it'd be possible to give any old tutor in any old group the power to create undeletable feedback on any page, but most sites won't want to do that.

Another thing to remember is that even if users were prevented from deleting staff/admin feedback, there's still nothing that will stop them from just making a fresh copy of the page, and then deleting the original.

29 November 2011, 7:33

Richard,

With regards to your first paragraph, I think I'd be happy to allow anyone set as site staff as having the power to create undeletable (by the student) feedback. Maybe another tickbox that the admin can set on/off dependant on requirements?

With regards to the second paragraph, that is true, but I'm reckoning that most of my students would not think that way and I certainly won't be intimating that to them