#Courseforum scheduling series#

We’re all very accustomed to seeing sticky posts when we register for a new discussion forum which outline the rules of the forum. Ensure that you properly communicate expectations and rules for using the forum. The process is actually automated through his forum plugin and students who are assigned to a particular cohort can only access the appropriate discussion module when they log in.Ģ. When students enroll during a particular quarter they are assigned to that particular group of students within the forum. For example, we have one user who opens his course up for enrollment once per quarter. Some of our WP Courseware users create modules for each group of students, or cohort. However, we’ve also seen online course forums organized in other effective ways. As students progress through the course, they’ll know exactly where to find answers or start new threads.

#Courseforum scheduling series#

This is especially helpful if you have a self-paced course and students are enrolling and starting the course at different times.įor example, if your course has eight different primary modules with each module representing a series of individual lessons around a single concept, create a forum module for each of the course modules.

In our experience, the most effective structure is to organize your course forum to align with the flow of your course content. Within an e-learning environment, forums can be broken down several different ways. How were they organized? What made them useful? How did they help you find the information you were looking for or connect with the people you wanted to find? Think about the forums you’ve used in the past… When setting up a course forum, the most critical element to think through is its structure. Take time to think through how your forum modules will be organized. In this article, we wanted to share a few tips and guidelines for helping you create a forum which truly becomes an effective resource for your students.ġ.

Most importantly, we wanted students to be able to help one another and find answers to their questions before submitting questions directly to us.īut while putting a course forum in place isn’t difficult, making it an effective resource for your students requires proper planning and an understanding of what elements you want the forum to bring to your training to enhance the learning experience.Īfter creating online forums for our own courses over the years and working with over 20,000 WP Courseware course creators, we’ve seen forums that work well and some that don’t work so well.

We wanted students to be able to connect on a personal level by having a place to engage in off-topic discussions.Ĥ. We wanted students to be able to share effective learning strategies with others.ģ. We wanted to give students a way to discuss the course concepts to help reinforce them.Ģ. We had several intentions behind adding a forum to our course:ġ. Once our students logged into their member dashboard, we linked directly to the forum in addition to the course content. When we created our first online training course in 2011, we launched the course with a forum that we’d built using the WP Mingle forum plugin (yes, this was before the rise of popularity of bbPress and other current options). We’ve written about some of the benefits of using a course forum to facilitate discussion with students in the past, and WordPress makes it very simple to set up and configure forums on your site. Adding an online course forum to your site can be one of the most effective ways to enhance the learning experience of your students.