Discussions

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.

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.