[p2pu-dev] Ways of designing a discussion forum

Stian Håklev shaklev at gmail.com
Wed May 25 23:24:58 UTC 2011


Since we've been discussing quite a bit how to make the discussion forum /
tasks more effective, I thought I'd take some screenshots of an environment
developed by a professor at my school of ed, which I used for an online
course this term. It worked quite well - really "got out of the way", and
enabled us to focus on the discussion.

https://picasaweb.google.com/shaklev/KnowledgeECommons#

You can choose to view each forum in three ways - either like a threaded
discussion forum with only the titles listed, where clicking on a message
loads that message on the whole screen. Or a split screen email-like view,
with threaded discussions on the left, and messages on the right. Or,
finally, a "full content view", where the entire content of each message is
listed under each other (like P2PU right now).  When replying, you see the
message you reply to on one side, and the reply on the right.

He also has an experimental mode where each forum gets an embedded Etherpad,
which can be used to keep track of important issues etc.

Not suggesting we do things exactly like this, but I think it's useful to
see how others have done it. Also important to separate between courses
where the tasks/courses mainly play a coordinating/metadiscussion function,
and most of the "learning" or activity happens in other places, and courses
where the deep discussion happening on P2PU is the core function.

(also note that it's possible at any time to see who has read a note - this
functionality is available to everyone, not just the course organizer).

Stian

-- 
http://reganmian.net/blog -- Random Stuff that Matters
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