WP 5 Learner support framework

Support review and planning

Ioannis Stamelos/Vaios KolofotiasComputer Science DepartmentAristotle University of Thessaloniki

OpenED today…

The Opened.eu platform has 5,009 visits since May 25, 2011 and an average of 50 visitors per day.There are 604 currently registered users that interact with each other into this active community.It is expected that something can go wrong, so the Learner support must be a strong card for this platform.

Current Learner Support

The main tool facilitated by the OpenED platform for helping learners is the Forum. Registered users can post their questions there and either they are technical or course related, they will get an answer as soon as possible.

There are, also, chat sessions at the beginning of every module and during it, where tutors discuss with learners on the course related issues.

OpenED Forum Support

OpenED Chat Sessions

Support Planning

Although the current support structure seems enough for the demands of the community, we can add more functionalities to improve it. That should lead to more satisfied learners who will promote our project even further through their circles.

F.A.Q(Frequently Asked Questions)

“Frequently asked questions are listed questions and answers, all supposed to be commonly asked in some context, and pertaining to a particular topic”(source:wikipedia).

There should be a page where we can all(tutors and technical stuff) submit common learner questions and the answers that we provide to them(concerning technical or learning related issues).

F.A.Q(Frequently Asked Questions) 2/2

This functionality merely exists in OpenED as we can see at “How to start studying” under Help menu, but is limited and concerns only the starting process.

The FAQ functionality proposed will have several topics that concern users and questions & answers under them.

A proposed format follows

F.A.Q example

Questions & Answers 1/2

Another, more web 2.0, approach is to create a questions and answers page which will work like this: A learner will submit a question to a provided textfield and then other users or us will answer on this question. There can be several answers and users will vote the most accurate one.

The questions posted will be about the platform but they can also expand to open education. With this move, we may soon have some interesting data submitted by learners and tutors that will help us improve the platform and study the learners perspective on all these.

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Questions & Answers 1/2

Users may also have the ability to share an answer to social media like facebook,twitter etc, which will bring more publicity to our platform.

Some popular examples of this idea are:

http://stackoverflow.com

http://answers.yahoo.com

Stack Overflow

Yahoo Answers

Conclusion

Learners support at OpenED is quite satisfying at the moment but if we would like to improve it the two proposals mentioned will surely boost it a little more.

The F.A.Q although it’s a known and widely used method for providing support is quite steady and does not promote user interaction. It gathers all information together, which means it would be more easy to browse.

At the other hand, questions and answers functionality will give our platform a breath of fresh air and push users to interact with each other and spend more time logged-in.

Thank you

Ioannis Stamelos / Vaios Kolofotias