# Is anyone using Discourse in higher ed for courses?

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/is-anyone-using-discourse-in-higher-ed-for-courses/59132
**Category:** Community Building
**Created:** [March 15, 2017, 3:52am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/is-anyone-using-discourse-in-higher-ed-for-courses/59132 "2017-03-15T03:52:19Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
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### Author: ![fefrei](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/fefrei/32/119538_2.png) [@fefrei](https://meta.discourse.org/u/fefrei)
#### Post date: [March 15, 2017, 9:09am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/is-anyone-using-discourse-in-higher-ed-for-courses/59132/4 "2017-03-15T09:09:37Z")

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We’re currently doing this for multiple courses.

We have two approaches that both seem to work out:

For a mathematics preparatory course, we have one permanent Discourse instance that we re-use every year. This makes sense for us, because the course is organized by a team of volunteers, and there is both a large overlap between two consecutive years’ teams, and often a bit to discuss between courses. We archive and tag all topics before the preparations for a new course start. You can read a bit about my journey to do this here:

> [@Re-purposing a Discourse installation for a yearly event](https://meta.discourse.org/t/re-purposing-a-discourse-installation-for-a-yearly-event/34670):
>
> I’m using Discourse for a yearly event (a preparatory course at a university), both for internal use for the organizers and for discussion among participants. This year’s event has finished, and once usage has dropped below significance, I’d be okay with shutting the installation down. Next year, however, I want to have another installation ready, and the old topics available as an archive to the organizers. This leaves multiple options, and I’m not sure what is best: Archive HTML, New Instal…

For other courses, we use one Discourse instance for each iteration. So far, we’ve been simply shutting them down in the end, but in the future, I want to use multisite so I can keep the old instances running without causing significant additional load.

We use a custom course management system that manages submissions, grades, exams and so on. This CMS has a built-in phpBB-based forum, but also supports [Discourse SSO](https://meta.discourse.org/t/13045?silent=true) – so in the courses where we use Discourse, the “Forum” link in the CMS simply triggers an SSO login to the (`login required`) Discourse instance for this course. The Discourse instance has a site customization which adds a navigation bar on top, allowing you to get back to the CMS.

I’m sure one large Discourse instance with subcategories could work too, but we’ve made a really good experience with our one-instance-per-course approach.

I’d be happy to answer any questions you have 🙂

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