Forum .LRN Q&A: Might anyone like to design and build an e-mail centered forum enhancement?

I am preparing a new class of top-notch MBA students, most with years of professional experience, for the writing of their MBA thesis by having them write critical book reviews every week. In Thursday’s class they choose a text from one of their other classes for the following week, write a one page critical book review and post it on the forum by Sunday, choose one of the posted reviews and write a page of constructive criticism by Tuesday, print out and review all of the contributions on Wednesday, and so are prepared to spend five minutes discussing each contribution in the next class on Thursday. They love the writing practice, they are curious about each other’s comments, are tickled that they are learning from each other, and when they arrive in their other class having prepared so well they now surprise their other instructors with their depth of preparation. Using the Dotlrn forums in this way helps me help them organize their work, provide them with meaningful, peer-review feedback, and develop an intellectual community that, I believe, will assist them greatly when they begin writing their MBA thesis a year from now.

In discussing this process today we came up with two enhancements we think will make this easier.

First, might there be a way to answer a notification via email and so avoiding having to log on to the platform? They are thinking of listserves, where one simply sends an email to an address, but they want the response associated with the original entry.

Second, when responding to an entry, Dotlrn presently sends you only your response and not the entry being responded to. They say that not being able to see the entry being responded to directly means they can’t begin to evaluate the response's merits. Since this evaluation is central to the assignment, they have to log on and download the whole forum -- which is fine for me, since I wait until the end, but not so fine for them as they want simply to pick one entry, work on it, and evaluate the others along the way. That is, they would like emailed to them the same view one sees now when responding to a forum entry from within Dotlrn forums and where, upon submitting an entry, you are returned both your response and the original entry.

I would like to add to this two forum printing enhancements.

First, what would it take to insure that a printout retained the indentation of replies so one could see, in my example, ten original entries each with their indented replies.

Second, what would it take to print out a selection of forum entries, in this case, an entry and its replies only.

I write this in the spirit both of the “Good Practices in Elearning?” forum, suggesting that a discussion of good practices might here be profitably associated with an inquiry into application design, and the “Dotlrn Consortium ‘Microgrants’” thread, whereby I am hoping some enterprising developer might see an interesting design problem, a quick way to make a fast buck, and make me, my users, and the larger user community happy, too. I would be interested in working with a developer or developer team towards these modifications and securing the financing: I offer design criteria, user scenario, and contribute to the application, and the designers build the thing and get paid for it.

Any takers?

All the best,

Bruce

Hey guys, we need to coordinate, we have already started an effort for doing a general purpouse incoming email processing (answers to notifications) for automatic posting on any pkg through email, i.e. forums.  I would like to avoid re-inventing the wheel again and again, specially with the funds that are comming from the consortium.

We'll try to integrate the code from CTK-Musea project that kindly shared with us, which is supposed to deal with this. Or re-implement if needed. INT from France (e-lane partner), is working on that now.

For the evaluation of each post, I suggest an integration with the evaluation pkg, which will allows the professor to easily keep the grading, is what makes more sense instead of creating a gradding system for the forums, evaluation is already an gradding system flexible for .LRN. You might try evaluation and get a better picture of how this can be done (and then we can discuss about the best approach), and at Galileo we'll be happy to help / guide with specifics about evaluation pkg, so the developer that implements this will not be guessing on evaluation pkg.

Thanks Rocael!  The whole idea is to tease out the problem in a thread like this, so I'm much obliged for the quick reply!  Is this evaluation package in the present 2.1 or on the MIT site Andrew just made available?  The issue with returning just pieces of the forum is keeping the access light and fast, working within the forum, and ideally, without having to open up another access point (I'll check this out, gladly).

I like what I see in "Class Material", Rocael! But what I'm after is not a summative evaluation (grade), but a formative evaluation: a way for me and my students to offer constructive criticism of each other's work on a timely basis and a scheduling and presentation mode that will help students know what to do when and how and help them learn from what others are doing along the way.

I'm comfortable searching and sorting through lists, but when asking students to do a sequence of activities using unfamiliar and complex technology I find I must create a clear schedule of activities and reduce confusion to a minimum. So, I can't simply ask students to print out lots of stuff (unlike many faculty, most do not have laser printers and limitless piles of paper and toner), and if I can save them five minutes of sorting through heaps that is five minutes more of the total of 90 minutes per week I can ask of them altogether: I think the success of this technology depends on maintaining high rates of return (increasing learning, fun, etc.) for the considerable investment (learning how to use the platform, logging on, clicking through links) this technology requires.

The students have many courses, jobs, a love life, etc., and to help them consolidate and extend their learning I am sequencing activies during the six days outside of class. So, groups of ten students post book review to a forum by Saturday and so get to see and learn from each other's work It is nice they can get notifications pouring in, reminding them of the deadline and offering potential solutions to the problem, and it is nice they can print out the whole thread to examine their own work in context. Now it gets complicated: they must also choose among the submitted work to prepare a written response by Tuesday, and for this it is terrific they can print out an individual notification. But as they are learning about the writing of good responses, too, if they are to learn from the responses of others they need to see what the response is referring to: hence, my wanting them to print out a given item: why the simple icon idea is the way to go!

Of course, students could print out and collate the notifications, but in practice they don't go to the trouble. But if they are presented with a forum entry and its response together on one page, as I presently do by cutting and pasting and making copies for class discussion, they would have no excuse for not reading both together, and better, this presentation form highlights dialogue as an object of study: in this class, non-native speakers are learning the languages of working groups and problem-solving, too (for example, the difference between "you should do this ..." and "it might be helpful to consider ...").

On this point, I'm wondering about what work is being done on expanding and collapsing threads in the forums. I've started using gmail and love the threading feature, where emails responding to others are viewed together and in sequence and where you are first presented with but the headers of each in order and then can expand one or more. This format preserves relationships, as they advertise, and being able to view a dozen or more emails solving a problem is a tremendous resource for the study of project development and management.