But because I'm a moderator of the 'Course and course formats' and 'Themes' forums I read them several times a day. Often when I go off to the 'General help' forum there is a question about Essential or Collapsed Topics that I could have answered in a matter of minutes but because it was in that forum I missed it as I only frequent that forum every now and then. Such as 'I have a problem with Essential, where should I post?', which the answer will be 'the Themes forum'. Perhaps the answer to this would be another forum! But that that forum should be called 'New Moodlers' - a place to ask questions when you're not sure of where your question is best answered. This then leads to the question "How can we make things better and more friendly for new Moodlers?". Forums are orchestrated by humans and thus are the first port of call. ![]() We are humans, when we have a problem we ask a human first before turning to a guide. This is can be compounded as evolution takes place and regular Moodlers adapt but don't see how it looks when you've not seen it before.Īs there is forums, then guides / FAQ's are not so useful, for example at the top of the 'Courses and course formats' forum ( ) I created a 'help' guide, but I know from the posts that this has not been read. Whilst to experienced Moodlers like myself everything looks fine, but we do forget how it must appear to somebody for the first time. This is when things become scary for beginners. There is additionally the steep learning curve of understanding how Moodle is constructed and therefore this knowledge leads to knowing what forum to post in. Where perhaps things don't quite work is there is a long list of forums, not that they are not all needed but that it's human nature to just post in the first place that makes sense, not go any further and hope for the best. In terms of "tweaking" is there any realistic prospect that the Moodle forum tool is going to be updated with reputation tracking, up/down voting, subject tagging? ![]() It may be that I'm sticking my head above a parapet here but I thought I'd ask the question "are we using the *best* tool for the job"? The questions are asked by actual users with real questions and it feels that it offers a much better way of handling that specific form of interaction. The Moodle forums are great for asking questions and getting the community to respond, but they do feel a bit like a walled garden, and finding questions that have already been answered is really quite difficult.Īlso there is no idea / mechanism that a question asked in the forum has been answered. ![]() Now, he is a Computer Science teacher (and hand-cranks haskell scripts to build his own course materials), and his reaction was that this question and answer (as opposed to Frequently Asked Questions) format that he finds on StackExchange (to which he contributes as an "expert") works well in providing answers that can be easily found and to an extent have been validated via the reputation systems that are built-in. I don't think he had a specific thing, but that he couldn't (maybe didn't want to) simply just ask a question (i.e. I do agree that FAQs are pretty useless, but I use things like Stackoverflow almost daily as a developer and I don't think that it is offering an FAQ.
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