The membership and social networking tools available for WordPress today make it possible to create learning platforms that facilitate peer/community learning.
Chris Lema, the outgoing General manager of LearnDash, called this the 'next shift' in eLearning for what well-designed online courses are capable of delivering to learners.
Are you offering a social learning experience as part of your online courses built in WordPress? What would be your recommendation in terms of picking the right tools to use, and how to effectively start facilitating peer learning?
We use BuddyBoss for some of the community aspects. We create most of our learning platforms using LearnDash, and this works well with it. It allows learners to connect with each other, send messages and contribute to discussion forums.
You end up with two types of group in the platform (LearnDash groups and BuddyBoss social groups) but it seems to work well.
We also use WordPress’ native comments feature too to provoke discussions and comments based on learning content. This is an approach FutureLearn use in their courses and we’ve adopted this approach.
Given we tend to be creating platforms for cohort-based formats, we’ve had to customise some of the code to make this work so that individuals can only see comments and discussions from those within their cohort. Let us know if you want to see this in action.
We’ve not really explored using external channels, like Slack, but I think the value and technological choice around this really depends on your audience. If they are really ‘into it’, I imagine they may create their own backchannel anyway. That’s certainly been the experience of programmes I’ve been on myself!