Users in professional roles (architects, doctors, lawyers, teachers, accountants etc) can benefit significantly from being able to produce a report summarizing and characterising their engagement with a relevant online forum.
Professionals are typically required to undertake regular CPD (Continuing Professional Development) activities throughout each year, and to provide evidence that they have done so, in order to retain registration/certification in their chosen field
Evidence of engagement with a forum that covers professionally relevant topics can contribute towards meeting this requirement.
To this end, what is needed is a report on the user’s forum activity statistics, that can be initiated by users themselves, as evidence to demonstrate their engagement with relevant material on the forum.
Although establishing the quality of the user’s engagement with and contribution to the material found on a forum will always be subjective, being able to objectively support claims at least around the time spent, the volume of material engaged with in one way or another, and the topic relevance of the material engaged with, would be helpful.
So I am suggesting this report should be able to filter for
- Start date to End Date (or Start Date to Start Date+3 months, +6months, or +12 months)
- Statistics as to the forums, subforums, categories, tags and topic titles that the user has engaged with (reading or posting)
- A breakdown of activity, within relevant each forum, subforum, category, tag and topic title - posts read, posts responded to, threads started, and the numbers of words submitted overall vs number submitted by the user in that forum, subforum, category, tag or topic title.
- Ideally this should extend to participation by email - though perhaps posts sent by email (that did not bounce) could be separately tabulated from posts positively clicked on for reading online.
Would need to count only full unique posts sent by email to the user, not digests or other emailed notifications.
Would need to not double count prior posts appended to emailed replies.
No easy way of knowing for sure how many of the posts sent by email are actually read in fairness - unless an opt-in read-receipt system is implemented, for those explicitly wanting CPD relevant activity stats collected on themselves - either way this statistic should be available but probably always tabulated separately from material read online.
No such problem with posts responded to by email, or new threads started by email, I guess, since they show up on the forum and can be counted there.
A great option would be for the report to generate a full list of the topic URLs that the user has made, read or responded to - that way a random audit could be done, or the user themselves can go back review what they have read and said, in a convenient way, and satify themselves that that material was indeed relevant .
Another metric might be a statistic for time spent logged in.
To avoid privacy concerns - the data collection and reporting would need to initiated by the user themselves, and the data not available to anyone else (I guess other than the administrator).
Of course it will aways be very easy for a lazy user to game any such system - but right now, providing assessors with a self-reported estimate of the hours spent reading or writing to a forum is the only other option forum users have.
Making some empirical evidence available would be very helpful.