Exploring Discourse as a Learning Management System

[leopedrini (Leonardo Zanoni Pedrini)]

Thanks, everyone! Contributions have been really great.

Before I get into my responses, let’s have a quick summary of the motivation:

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• We’ve been one of the largest telecom and ICT communities for decades. Thousands of members across all networks (e.g., LinkedIn), and we also have a forum (Discourse).

• Despite having thousands of discussions to date, we still see plenty of room for improvement.

• For instance, a new member who joins the community today and wants to learn something consistently and continuously, like 5G, often gets lost amidst the many questions (and answers) about 5G, ranging from basic topics for beginners to advanced ones.

  • These new members almost always reach out and ask questions like, “How can I learn 5G? What do you suggest?”

• Another example, even experienced users, when they have a doubt, often just post a new topic, even if the question has probably already been discussed.

  • Of course, some will say, “Teach old members to search before posting.” Yes, we do that, but we have to agree that with the ever-increasing number of topics, it’s not so easy.

Hence, the idea of an “index” or something similar, our Collaborative Learning System, which would serve as a guide for all new and old members alike.

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Now, onto answering the questions…

@pfaffman

So you have a topic to outline the required topics and if you open all the topics you’ve finished?

You could do something like that with an outline topic and/or a tag. When a user has read all topics matching the tag a badge could be awarded. If you’re self hosted and can use badge sql that might be good enough for your use case.

Yes, it would be great. Unfortunately, we don’t have any members who have the time for this, not even me, as I have my regular job. As I mentioned, the free forum is done in our spare time.

But I’ll try to talk to the other moderators; maybe they’ll consider and find a way to go down this path.

@Jagster

What you described was just a normal and traditional way. But perhaps you simplified actual plans a bit. Moodle would be an answer but it is quite heavy system. Free, though.

But you could achieve it using groups, I reckon. Or you can rethink need of roadmap.

Not exactly. At least, from what I know, the normal and traditional way doesn’t have such a direct connection with the community where members can interact in each topic and expand the discussion, for example.

There might be a way, but I’m not aware of it, which is why I asked for help from the experts here.

In any case, thanks again for all the help so far.

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I won’t go into details here; that’s not the goal. But if anyone is interested in seeing what we’ve been thinking of as our roadmap or collaborative learning system so far, here’s the link:

telecomHall Collaborative Learning System - Introduction

And at the moment, we’re also brainstorming in the community. I’ll post any updates we come up with here.