Feature Requirements
Forums are a known factor among learners, which means they typically need very similar features and functionality, using known terminology. This doesn’t necessarily mean discussions cannot be improved, but where features exist they need to have easily understood functionality and terminology, and there’s not a ton of radical changes that can or should be made to change the experience.
Unlike other features, I’m not going to go into depth on what a forum is here - Forums have existed since BBSes in the 1970s, and honestly they are in decline in popularity in favour of the short-form feeds found in social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter X, or channel-based communication platforms like Slack, Teams, or Discord.
That being said, some of the general needs of an ideal discussion forum are as follows. Whether Open edX Palm currently meets these requirements is denoted by a ✅ or ❌ for visibility.
To define areas of the discussion to post into, called Topics in Open edX (and we shouldn’t fundamentally change discussion terminology between versions) ✅
To allow users to post discussion threads (posts in Open edX) ✅
To allow users to respond to those posts, and to reply to each other (responses and comments in Open edX) ✅
Moderation features to allow staff to:
Restrict who can post into a topic ❌
Lock posts so that a conversation ends, or does not start unnecessarily ✅
Edit/Delete all elements (topics, posts, responses, comments) ✅
Set pins, to allow posts to be highlighted to users ✅
Move discussions from one topic to another ✅
Split discussion responses into their own threads when the conversation diverges ❌
Manage problematic content flagged by learners ✅
See posts in cohorts they are assigned to ❌
See posts in each/all cohorts ✅
Post to specific other cohorts ✅
Ban users from participating in discussions ❌
Highlighting of staff-endorsed content ✅
The ability to ask questions and select answers (a la Stack Overflow) ✅
Post following, to ensure new activity in interesting discussions is easy to find ❌
User following, to be notified and easily find content from users of note (such as staff) ❌
Email and/or in-app notifications for new activity in followed posts ✅
Summary emails of activity since the user’s last visit to promote engagement ❌✅
Search and filtering functionality to find posts ✅
Auto-moderation to define things like banned words, spam filters, and automated actions to take when a discussion is posted (such as automatically responding to let a learner know there’s a problem with their post) ❌
Auto-locking to prevent threads from being resurrected after a period of time has passed ✅
Protection from “flooding”, preventing an individual learner from posting to the same discussion thread repeatedly in a short time span ❌
“Liking” to allow learners to express their support for a comment ✅
“Disliking” to allow learners to disagree with a comment or signal that an answer may be incorrect without having to respond directly and potentially start an argument ❌
Mobile-friendly display and interface ✅
Mobile push notifications ❌
Social media integrations to make it easy to share posts publicly ❌
Analytics dashboards to break down and present dashboards and data on discussion usage ❌
Anonymous discussion and response posting ✅
Time-bound anonymity, hiding identities until the discussion has picked up, removing potential poster bias ❌
Anonymity bypass for staff to optionally be able to see who has posted anonymously ✅
“Competition mode”, where likes are hidden until a certain time passes, and responses are sorted randomly ❌
Emoji-based post reactions ❌
Contextualised inline discussion embedding to integrate discussion into learning ✅
Discussion instructions integrated with the discussion to direct posts towards a specific task or activity ❌
Grade awardable by staff for discussion participation ❌
Due dates for graded discussion participation ❌
Automated discussion participation grading based on posting, responding, commenting, liking, and being liked by others ❌
Permalinking - Providing an easily accessible link for each post and reply ❌
File attachments for learners to share files from a restricted list of types ❌
Word counts, for learners to see how many words they have written (for assignments such as “Share at least 150 words on your favourite cheese”) ❌
Lock dates, for when a discussion will no longer accept responses ❌
Blackout dates, for when discussions cannot be used, for things like exam periods ❌
Automated accessibility checking and issue flagging for learner submitted content (such as “You’ve shared an image which does not have alternative descriptive text”) ❌
Post read/unread status tracking for learners to see when there are new posts ✅
Manual control to mark posts read/unread for later ❌
Access to deleted replies for staff to review malicious activity or recover accidental loss ❌
Support for much smaller collaborative group discussions ✅
Support for feeding out discussion posts as an RSS feed ❌
“Post before viewing” - a setting to require learners to make a substantive post before they are allowed to see the responses of other learners ❌
Draft saving and copying for staff to pre-prepare learner messages ❌
Pre-scheduled messages included in future course runs to send the same announcements to discussions at the same point in the course ❌
As the experience of discussion forums is something that does not truly vary significantly between platforms, while functionality differs more often, I’ve decided to capture the forum feature comparisons in Discussion Forum Feature Comparison rather than writing about them at length here. Skilljar and other similar platforms also do not even feature forums as their focus is on anti-social, self-paced learning.