I never knew how popular discussion forums would be because the old site never had them. Now that I’ve introduced this blog with it’s own “Discussion forums” category and have been monitoring the traffic to each category, I can tell you that the “Unisa past papers” and “Download study notes” ones are the most visited, while nobody seems interested in reading about discussion forums.So now I’m leaning towards my original opinion that we don’t really need discussion forums. I used to be against them for two main reasons:
- It’s a hassle arranging for moderators
- Forums wouldn’t be used for their intended purpose. i.e. meaningful discussions about the subject
And now I have a third reason: students don’t seem to be looking for forums! Sure, if you provide them they will be used. But, and this is key, think about what forums are used for. When I was a student, the Unisa forums were mainly filled with posts asking for solutions to assignments, past papers, notes, etc. and hardly anybody was discussing the work. So if I can provide what people are asking for in the forums then we don’t need these forums, not so?
It will take a lot to persuade me to introduce discussion forums now, but you can try 