Forum Discussion
We launched a new forum for exchanging e-learning best practices 🤝
Hey all! If we haven't met yet, my name is Noele and I'm the new Director of Community here at Articulate.
Over the last few months I've been having a ton of virtual coffee chats 🍵 with community members to get to know you better and learn more about how you want to use E-Learning Heroes. (If we chatted: thank you so much).
One of the big things I took away from those chats is that your expertise and work in the E-Learning industry goes so far beyond what you do with Articulate's products. This community is full of experts not only in how to make the most of Storyline and Rise, but in all things e-learning: storyboarding, adult learning principles, working with SMEs, and so much more. And you want to talk about it with each other.
Today I'm excited to share that based on your feedback, we've added a new forum to E-Learning Heroes: Exchange Best Practices (you can find it under the Connect tab).
Think of this new forum like your virtual co-working space: you can use it to ask other e-learning pros for advice on how to best work with SMEs, look for ideas and brainstorming on how to make your latest course more engaging, discuss the latest news in the e-learning industry, and more.
Have a best-practice discussion you want to start now? We can't wait to see it!
To grease the wheels, I also popped in a question of my own that I'd love to get your thoughts on.
Excited to get to know you all and your work better in this space!
4 Replies
I, for one, am sorry to see a separate area created for "everything e-learning."
The previous community platform had separate areas: one for product-related questions, and one called "Build Better Courses."
- The latter was supposedly for general questions and discussions about eLearning, but many of the questions asked how to "build" stuff in Storyline and Rise.
- The product-related area had lots of general questions about eLearning best practices.
- In other words, people didn't always post their question in the appropriate area. And that made it more bothersome to answer questions and harder to search for answers.
The new community already has a similar problem. There's a separate area called "Suggest Ideas." Folks who use that do limit those posts to feature requests. But you'll find a whole lotta feature requests in this area, too.
Meanwhile, this "Discuss" area (which I noticed is now called "Discuss Articulate Products") has multiple tags for topics that aren't directly related to products:
Bottom line: IMHO, it's better to have one area for questions/discussions. (What would improve that experience is better search and filter functions.)
Really appreciate this feedback, JudyNollet! I think your point about easy searchability is a good one, that we heard from a ton of other members as a big pain point during initial research & feedback. Honestly, it's a pain point for me as well as a daily user of this community. So, we're definitely trying to improve that problem to the degree that we can with the technology we're using, in tandem with some of the other changes (which we hope you'll come to see as improvements!) to E-Learning Heroes. Hopefully we can address your core concern of wanting to be able to easily find questions you want to answer & search for information you're looking for.
At the same time, there was a good amount of feedback during our research & conversations with community members that the current community is so focussed on highly technical questions that it makes it harder for folks who are newer to the industry, or even who have different areas of expertise, to start interacting with one another—it was common for folks to share that it took them years or even a decade plus to start actually interacting in E-Learning Heroes because of this. In other words, I think the current setup is probably best suited to someone like you who has a really high level of technical skill and knowledge and primarily uses this community to communicate about that, but has some big gaps for folks who use or want to use this community in different ways.Adding a forum that's focussed on a wider array of conversation is one thing we currently think will help support that feedback. And, I think it's important to know that we're not just adding new forums to the community, we're also adding new efforts from our community team to help support these changes. So, think of that as the difference between just adding a new wing to a community center building and building a new wing to accommodate all the new programming we want to offer you there. You're absolutely right that it's common in big communities for people to post in places that aren't the perfect fit, and at the same time we think that our staff is going to be able to help proactively set that tone to mitigate that risk. In my time working in the community industry I've definitely seen some communities where the architecture is really complex and it makes it confusing for members; I've also seen communities where a more complex architecture + the stewardship of the community team can help serve the community members really well as it makes space for more kinds of interactions.
So, all this to say—I think your core point is accurate, and at the same time hope we're able to address those pieces of feedback in time while also testing some changes to support the wide array of ways our members want to use this space. And, of course, we're going to keep updating and making changes based on ongoing research and feedback, and I know you'll be a part of that because you're a part of our superheroes program and have a pretty close line of communication with our team. You have my email & are always welcome to shoot me a message with more feedback as it comes up!Noele_Flowers : Thanks for providing additional info about the reasoning behind this change.
I'll add a little extra too. I've seen folks who add a bunch of tags to their question. For example, they might ask about Storyline, but they also add tags for other products and/or the general tags. I'm guessing they think that adding extra tags will somehow increase the visibility of their post. As I understand it, though, the purpose of the tags is to more easily filter a search—in which case, the extra, not-really-relevant tags aren't helpful.
In short, I recognize how tough it is to set up a community that includes such a wide range of expertise and expectations.
Best wishes to you and team!
