Why is this irksome? Because it plain doesn't work. Encouraging or forcing people to communicate is awkward at best; when the population count is in the tens of thousands, it means you end up with a lot of one-liners, “me too”s, clichés and platitudes.
Take the Diabetes MOOC. One of the discussion topics this week was “should we systematically sequence the genomes of newborn children to identify risks?” Within a couple of days, roughly two-thirds of the answers were along the lines of “no that's eugenist, you big Nazi you”. About half of the remaining posts were from one single “superposter” who apparently took it as his holy duty to answer as close as every single post as possible. The rest may have been thoughtful, intelligent responses but by that time my eyes had glazed over. I didn't even try to raise the level of the debate (yet, based only on the lectures, there was a lot to say about the − poor − predictive abilities of genome sequencing, false positives, etc.)
UT's Age of Globalization had mandatory forum participation. Well, that's a humanities course, I guess student interaction is pretty much an integral part of the point, so pointing towards the only interaction medium there is seems logical; however in the end we had the same behaviour: most people would just upvote an entry they liked, or respond with a one-line “me too!” or “no you're wrong”, and get the 1 point credit towards the certificate.
What it all leads to is a terrible signal/noise ratio, which is a powerful disincentive for quality participation. Thinking through an issue, weighing the pros and cons, imagining the various points of views takes time and effort; seeing that all this effort is systematically rewarded by either nothing or a short “thanks, that was very interesting” (or worse “that doesn't make me change my opinion”) that doesn't bring anything to the discussion, is disheartening.
The problem is compounded when the forum software itself is not so great. Take a look at edX's forum:
- Very, very poor use of screen real estate. The screenshot above shows the totality of the forum's landing page for 15.071x, on my desktop computer which has a 27", 1920×1080 pixel display. Two million available pixels and edX only shows 8 posts − half of which are pinned staff announcements that once read, are of no interest whatsoever to students. So that leaves… yeah, four posts being displayed. Hurray.
- Actually when you click on a post, the height of the forum, including navigation pane, increases to the minimum of display height (minus some padding) and total post (with responses) height. Huh, what? That's really inconsistent from a UX point of view − the navigation pane's display should never be dependent on the detailed view. Makes the display jump around unpredictably.
- The scrolling behaviour between the two panes is a mess. It's such a mess that I don't even want to think it through.
- The forum structure (subsections) are hidden from view; by default the forum shows “all discussions”. It's far from obvious that there even are subsections, and that one should use them.
- There is no moderation worth of the name: basically the TAs just delete posts that violate the honour code (such as posting full homework solutions) but don't do the necessary housekeeping (such as moving threads to the correct subsection). Maybe there's moderation of flamewars, as I didn't see any, but I would pessimitically just think people can't be bothered to flame each other.
- The navigation pane's entries are: subject, number of upvotes, number of comments. And that's all. No mention of first post date, last comment date, first post author, last post author, whether staff have answered the post, etc.: all elements that can pique the interest of potential readers.
- Sorting is very basic. The most obvious missing options are “unanswered posts” and “most active discussions”.
- There is upvoting of posts, but no downvoting.
What this means is that the most active threads are the “Eeeee I'm from Wherever and really excited about this course!”, hello-introduce-yourself ones, and a couple of staff-originated course-related threads. Not so great for a community.
Some edX courses also suffer from their being split into multiple parts − meaning that the forum dynamic, if and when it has been established, has to restart from scratch every five weeks. Huh, a month is not enough for a community to assert itself, you know?
As usual, Coursera's software is a little better finished (either Coursera is much better funded − which is likely, the company has raised something like 85 million dollars according to Wikipedia; edX being a non-profit can't raise venture capital and relies on contributions from, as I gather, MIT, Harvard, UCBerkeley and Google) so most of these “glaring” issues are avoided, but there are still no “view unread” / “most active” filters; one has to navigate to the subforum one wants to check out the discussions there. Generally the end result is the same: slogging through the forums is a chore, and the signal-to-noise ratio is abysmal.
To be fair, the edX forums have one redeeming virtue, and that is the possibility to link subforums to courseware pages. What this means is that in practice, there are mini-forums embedded in the courseware pages, specific to that content − for instance, in ANU's ASTRO1x course, the weekly “mystery” page has its own subforum; in a limited way, that lets student skip the tedious forum navigation. (They also have good MathJax integration, letting people enter beautiful formulae).
Part of the problem is that the platforms just recreated (from scratch, with limited means… nuff said) forums following a dying model anyway. Online forums in the traditional sense have had their glory days from about the early 2000s (when they finally took over from newsgroups) to the early 2010s (when they've been displaced by Facebook, Google+/Hangouts, etc.) In 2014, for good or worse, they're not an appropriate medium anymore. Users are not used to the discipline of finding out the best subforum to post to, then slogging through the forum archives to find unanswered posts, watch out for replies, etc. They're used to the little red thingummy on Facebook telling them someone's replied to their posts.
Others have already written about how to solve the problem. I'm not certain that just waving the Web2.0 wand will magically make all troubles go away, but certainly, one can take a leaf off some social sites. Embedding live chat can be a good idea; it was tried for CS169 part 2, I think, unfortunately they picked a heavyweight JS IRC client that slowed down the pages tremendously and often made them crash altogether (it was kind of ironic to see such crappy, badly-tested software being put together for a course about software quality…), so after a few days a TA put up a note on the course forums giving instructions for how to disable the chat component completely. A worse admission of failure I have rarely seen; but the idea has some merit. A component integrated with the platform (rather than third-party) might work, especially if some thought is given to screen real estate usage (small font sizes, less whitespace, and you could fit a narrow chat column to the right of an edX courseware page even on a 1280px wide display − let's not even mention responsive design).
Having a look at how StackExchange works might yield some ideas − cleanly separate random chat from serious questions/answers. Make it easy for people to find if a question has already been asked, find unanswered questions, kill (through downvoting for instance) duplicates and obviously worthless posts (like the individuals demanding special treatment). Have a look at how Discourse do things. Throw in some social media features (add specific posters to watch list, to make sure one never misses a post from JonPowles on the ASTRO1x forums; conversely, blacklist people who tend to be irritating) to be in the mood of the 2010s. Perhaps add direct messaging if you must.
Connect courses together. It's highly likely that students who took Introductory Biology will move on to more advanced biology courses; letting people follow through with their mini-social network already set up would be nice − and the possibility to refer to discussions that've already been had in other courses would be handy. I was quite surprised when taking an end-of-course survey, and one of the questions was “Do you intend to keep in touch with fellow participant?” − I realized that I couldn't actually name a single fellow participant. Also, why would I want to keep in touch? I don't know anything about them, in all likelihood we have nothing in common apart from a shared interest, at a specific point in time, in a specific course.
(I thought that segmenting the forums − basically create “bags” or “classes” of a few thousand students − might help too, but probably would do more harm than good: all of the dynamic online communities I've seen have had a core of a handful of stalwarts. I'm not sure the number of high-value individuals scale linearly with the size of the community, so segmenting would prevent these individuals from connecting with each other and create a good group dynamic. Besides, cutting up a 200,000-strong cohort into a hundred 2,000-strong classes would mean TAs have 2,000 times the moderation / participation workload.)
So, yeah, building decent forum/community software is a significant endeavour. It takes time, and effort, which the various providers may prefer spending on other things (e.g. fixing edX's dashboards, or the horribly slow math input fields; or indeed work on XBlocks so future courses may use more advanced tools). And I know, edX's open source, so why don't I just fork the code, fix it, and do a pull request? Well, apart from the fact that it is a significant endeavour and that even if I were to find the time and motivation to build such a thing (not to mention that my Python skills are inexistant), my PR would almost certainly not be merged (it is highly unusual that far-ranging changes that come out of the blue are accepted by open source projects, especially ones as active as edX − there were 31 merges on May 9th alone).
As a final note, I'd be interested to see how NovoEd does things. They're branding themselves as a “social environment for online courses” rather than as a “platform for creating and hosting MOOCs”; they will have given much thought to community-building. Unfortunately, the courses they're offering (mostly around finance, entrepreneurship, and startup creation) are of little to no interest to me, and I'm not quite ready to register to a boring course just to see how they're doing forums.
No comments:
Post a Comment