[David Jennings]

Hello Elizabeth, Yes, this is technically possible (though not just for small groups — we either do it for all or none of them). We looked into it when it was raised in another thread. As explained in my reply there, we decided against it recently because we felt the most-recent-appears-last order was a problem only in very popular topics where the discussion goes on to more than one page. If the whole topic fits on one page, then it seems most sensible to have most recent post appear last, because people are used to reading down the page from top to bottom, aren’t  they? We were also concerned that to change the order suddenly might confuse people and cause more problems than it solves.

However, you clearly think the current set-up is still less than ideal. Could you give some examples of where and why the most-recent-appears-last order creates problems, please? We’re willing to re-open this issue, but need to have a clear case for making any change, because people are bound to ask us…

all the best, David

[David Jennings]

Imogen, sorry for the slow reply. You’ll find webinar recordings on the Course Materials page. We also often blog about them. best, David

[David Jennings]

Hi Liz, Glad you’re finding the material fascinating. Getting the hang of the conversations does take a while — and that’s why we had the 10-day induction period, which I think you missed. Once you’ve got the hang of the routine for one week, though, we’ve tried to keep the format fairly consistent, so you should find everything makes more sense and is quicker with each successive week.

All the best, David

[David Jennings]

Thank you for this, Jo, and sorry for the slow reply. We have looked into the options for restructuring the forums. It is possible to switch it so that the newest post comes first, and it’s possibly to have more contributions per page. It’s not possible automatically to break contributions into threads on separate pages (we just have the subtle threading in the way the contributions are presented within the page).

I think the issue you experienced was acute last week when there was one very active forum, with lots of contributions per topic. This week, there are fewer contributions in total, and they are distributed more evenly over a number of topics (participants now seem to be more used to creating new topics, which aids navigation). Thus none of the topics actually extend over more than one page. Hopefully that means that one of the problems that was confusing you is no longer occurring.

We think it might add to the confusion to switch the order of posts suddenly, so that, instead of reading top to bottom, you read bottom to top.

So after some consideration, we’ve decided to leave things as they are for now, but keeping an eye on the issue. Happy to discuss this further if that would be helpful.

[David Jennings]

Hi John, can you explain the connection between this post and the activity for which this topic was created, which should be evident from the forum page, please? (I’m happy to have you mention SlideSpeech in appropriate contexts, but frequent and indiscriminate plugs may be perceived as… youknowwhat)

[David Jennings]

Hi Anonymous,

Thanks for taking the time to post this, and I’m sorry for the formatting problems (I’ve done a little work to tidy up your post, involving several html paragraph tags, which I agree is a cludgy way of having to do things – sorry).

I’ve done a fair bit of usability work, and I also had a big hand in putting this course together, so I’d like to respond to your questions — and I hope won’t come across as being too defensive.

UX design is easiest when you have a clear definition of the user population, their characteristics and the finite set of tasks that they wish to accomplish with whatever it is you’re designing.

One of the challenges is that learning rarely comes down to a finite set of tasks (except rote and mechanical skills, and even then…). More often learning involves creating an environment for an inherently unpredictable and wide-ranging set of tasks. That introduced a complexity problem: if you try and keep everything simple, then you narrow down the range of things people can do, and annoy them that way; if you make everything possible, then navigation becomes complex, and you annoy people a different way.

Add to this that this is an open course. Which means when we were designing it we couldn’t predict who our users would be. We could say that it was people “teaching in Higher Education” but that still leaves the user population very uncertain. Some of our international participants, we’re finding, are not familiar with the term Higher Education. So trying to design with such a range of possibilities in mind further adds to complexity and navigation issues.

One last thing. Learning isn’t the same as using a bottle opener or a text editor. Sometimes it’s supposed to be hard and present challenges. OK, I don’t mean it’s supposed to be hard to find out how to format a paragraph break — that is annoying. But not everything should be intuitive all the time. If you don’t challenge your intuitions, are you really learning at a deep level.

So what you have here is a maybe a bit Version 1.0, maybe a bit beta in places. There are some things we can only really test with large numbers of users, and you can’t really organise iterative prototyping with 1,000 learners (or, put another way, maybe that’s partly what we’re doing right now).

To finish, I will be a little defensive. We do respect your time, honestly. Thank you for taking the time to articulate these thoughts, and I hope my reply does them justice, at least partly.

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