There are occasions in which a faculty member would like students to be able to see one another's work: for example, sharing drafts of an essay, sharing written reactions to a reading or presentation, sharing diagrams or drawings, etc. The Forum activity is one way for students to share (and to comment on) one another's work, because all students can participate in a Forum, and by default, forum messages allow attachments. A student can post his/her/their document to the forum by launching a new topic/thread in the forum and attaching the file to that thread. Faculty members can also collect student work via the Assignment activity and then share all those files in a folder or in a topic block.
To make student sharing of files a bit easier, we have installed the "Student Folder" plugin on our Moodle server. The plugin allows students to upload their documents into a common, shared "drop-box," allowing other students in the course to access that file. The "Student Folder" plugin also allows a faculty member to share all of the student assignment submissions in a single folder. In this article, we will discuss the student sharing capability of the "Student Folder" plugin.
To create such a shared folder in your course that allows for student collaboration/sharing:
- Log in to Moodle at https://moodle.bucknell.edu (link opens in new window), and click on the link for your course in the Current Course List module on the right-hand side of the main Moodle page.
- If editing isn't turned on already, click on the
button at the top-right of your course Moodle page.
- Click on the "+Add an activity or resource" link in the bottom-right corner of the topic block where you want to add the student folder.
- Within the alphabetical grid of activities and resources, look for and click on the
icon.
- Enter a name for the folder in the "Student folder name" field, making it clear to students what they will be clicking on. You can also include a description (in the "Description" box) to tell students what they need to do. If you do include a description, you may want to click on the "Display description on course page" check box so that students see the description just underneath the folder on the course Moodle page:
- You can modify the settings in the "Student folder" section if you'd like, but the default settings tend to work fine. Even though the "Maximum attachment size" says "Course upload limit (0 bytes)," that actually just means that Moodle will accept the maximum upload size set for the server, which is 3 GB.
- In the "Timeslot for Upload/Approval" section, Moodle will start with the time you created the folder as the initial time when students can upload content to it, and it will set the time that the folder no longer accepts documents as one week later than that. You can choose a different deadline, if you want to prevent students from uploading content past a due date/time. Please remember that Moodle uses military time, so 3 PM (for example) would be 15:00:
- The rest of the default settings are all fine, so you can scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the
button to finalize the process.
- Students will now see a link to the folder, which they can click on in order to upload their file(s) into that folder:
