Features
Motivates students
- Simply interface
- Easy for students to use
- Terminology specific to education
- Not just a generic message board
- News from the Instructor
- Instructors can easily add motivational/informative news for students in a prominent location
- Uses student's names and photos on every post
- Creates a more "in person" feel to discussions
- View who is online
- Encourages real-time discussion and helps student motivation
- Student profiles
- Students make their own profile which includes name, photo, and relevant contact information to create a sense of belonging
- Advanced fulltext search and sorting
- Allows students to find the information they need quickly and easily
- Easily view unread posts
- Allows students to get straight to the new posts without sorting through ones they have already read
- Read topics as threads
- Easily keep track of an entire conversation by reading every post for a topic in chronological order on a single page without having to click to open each individual post
- Keep track of replies
- Each reply to a post displays a link and optional quote to the original message the reply is to
- Subscribe to get email notifications of new posts
- Encourage students to keep coming back to discuss by allowing them to receive prompt email notifications.
Judges students' motivation
- Normal usage helps judge motivation
- Many motivational indicators are recorded by students without any additional effort such as the number posts made, length of all posts, number of replies from others to a student's posts, number of topics read, number of times logged in, and length of login sessions.
- Survey collects additional indicators
- In addition to usage information, demographic information and intrinsic questions are carried out through surveys
- Real-time graphs of motivational indicators
- Each profile page for each student includes graphs that teachers can use to immediately see how a student is performing (graphs only available to teachers).
- Anonymized data export
- Allows for complex analysis of motivational indicators while protecting students' privacy