Ernie, I love this capability as you have intantiated it in the interface. (By the way, is this planned for 1.1, 1.2, or beyond?)
That said, I think there are some special cases that are worth considering. There are times when you want to encourage meta conversations about an activity, a sequence, or a curriculum of sequences. These conversations could be either one-to-one (i.e., a note from the student to the professor) or one-to-many (i.e., a post on a shared discussion thread). For now, let's focus on the latter family of use cases.
If I want to have a a meta-conversation capability at the sequence level, then the Optional Activities capability as you have it mocked up works great. Students can go post questions or observations in the optional discussion board at any time and faculty can pose over-arching conversation topics to be maintained as running discourse throughout the sequence.
One might also want to have focused conversations connected to a particular activity, most commonly in cases where students are asking for clarification around the activity or the related content. Ideally, this would be a one-to-many conversation, since other students may have the same questions. And it would be easy to access from within the activity itself. It may be that having the "optional" forum one click away is adequate. However, it would be particularly slick if there were a capability to attach what amounts to a thread-starting capability automatically to the bottom of every activity. Clicking on an "ask a question" icon might take the students directly to a new post screen in the "optional" discussion board and assign a default subject line or category to the post that links it to the activity the student was in. This might be overkill in the LAMS interface, though we find it to be useful in our own homegrown system.
In the final use case in this group, one might want a discussion board at the class level, i.e., at the level above any individual sequence that makes up the course curriculum. In general, this may be a function you decide to delegate to the integrating LMS. (That would be my inclination.) But it raises a more general question about the degree to which LAMS should provide either communication or monitoring capabilities above the sequence level. At the very least, I would argue that LAMS should provide course-level roll-up reporting of student progress in and submissions to the various sequences in the course.
But I digress. The main question is whether the need to allow student-initiated group discussions around an activity is strong enough and unique enough to merit special treatment of some sort. What do you think?
Posted by Michael Feldstein
