We are having a problem in that the number of people who are using the OpenLearn forums and making postings is rather limited. It is felt that the reasons for this may be:
- there are too many forums
- the forums are often too deeply embedded
- people may not be encouraged to enter the forum
Ideas discussed include making it look like there is just one forum, but with many threads, reducing the total number of forums so that there are a few key ones, centred around discipline areas for example.
Maybe forums are not the answer....learning journals can represent thought collection. What can we use the learning journals to do...encourage the idea of thought collections...personal learning journals.
They are personal, but you can get your journals so that they are viewable to everyone. It would be interesting to find out how many people are using the journal.
Discussed the need to make it easy to find the forums.
Jenny suggested there needed to be a generic invitation paragraph to each of the forums (rather than 700 or so different invites). The problems of getting and trying out good ideas and experimenting with them e.g. putting the tools next to the content.
Patrick said we were in an experimental mode and that there might be ways of doing things more quickly.
Jenny then added a new bit of information on the page following the discuss your ideas link. [TERM: Sticky block - part of the Moodel site that is stuck on every single page - usually located on the left and right hand sides]. This gave instructions of where to find the forums and a link to the forums.
