Educators play a key role in creating and growing an online discussion forum. Their goal is to design, facilitate, and deliver an excellent forum experience where online learners can interact and gain knowledge. The teaching methods and practices they choose influence how students will benefit from the forum. Thus making it essential for educators to create well-designed and engaging forums for their student’s needs. But how to create an online forum for your learners? Yes, we will help you learn how to create a forum for your LearnDash e-learning community using Learn Dash wpForo add-on. Also, we will list out the best tips to engage your online learners. Let’s go!
Online Forums – An Overview
First, you need to understand what they are before we dive deeper into growing your online forum. Online discussion forums are typically online spaces where people from diverse areas come together and hold discussions. Unlike other online platforms like social media, these forums are focused on discussions about a particular subject or brand.
Online discussion boards are often divided into several categories where participants can submit queries or discussion topics and respond to each other. Moreover, participant contributions are frequently longer than on social networking platforms and chat rooms. Also, many of them allow members to contribute to the discussion using multimedia content other than plain text.
Several LMS platforms like LearnDash are available to educators who wish to start their e-learning websites. With a compatible theme like the LearnMate LearnDash theme, you can get a complete solution for your e-learning site. Later, you can install add-ons to enhance functionalities in engaging learners in your courses.
Why LearnDash wpForo is the Ultimate Option?
Creating your online forum is an awesome way to allow your learners to interact with your community. It will help boost your student’s interest in your e-learning website. If you have a LearnDash website ready, you can quickly set up a forum using the LearnDash wpForo plugin. It is a feature-packed add-on for your learnDash-based e-learning website. Allow your students to interact through your online discussion forum and attach courses to it. Plus, you’ll get a dedicated widget known as wpForo Forum to check all the forum lists associated with a particular course. You can display the widget near your course.
LearnDash wpForo allows full freedom to course creators for protecting their forum discussions from non-enrolled students. They can offer read-only access to the non-enrolled audience. Moreover, they can decide whether the forum is visible to online learners who are enrolled to ANY or ALL users. Instructors can customize the messages that will be displayed on the forum for non-enrolled students.
5 Powerful Tips to Engage Your Online Learners
Engaging your learners through creative activities is a great way to boost your online discussion forum. However, proper research is still on top to move in the right direction. Below we have some great tips to help engage your online learners.
1. Identify Your Forum’s Strategy- Online Discussion Forum
One of the first things you should consider while keeping in mind is your forum strategy. You cannot engage your learners by randomly creating a forum and waiting for learners to communicate. As an educator, you need to carefully consider what you want from your forum, the goals, and what you should do to achieve them. It takes time and effort to create a successful forum so consider your enrolled learners and their interest while creating one. Establish who will be in charge of overseeing the community, your moderation team moderation, and the type of activities.
2. Recognize Diverse Points of View
You might have several learners in your online discussion forums, but each student may have different backgrounds and points of view. You can run an online forum thinking of all as the same. They might have different expertise, skillset, language, backgrounds, and even points of view. Thus you cannot apply the same strategy to all of them. As an online instructor, you need to consider flexibility and variety in your discussion activities to encourage better participation and engagement.
Also Read: Six Ways An Online Community Forum Benefits Your Business
3. Set Boundaries and Guidelines- Online Discussion Forum
Transitioning from a social media platform to an online discussion forum may sometimes become a little difficult for learners. The use of social media platforms helps make students comfortable with the online message and chat features. However, moving them to a professional discussion forum requires setting borders and guidelines. This contains forum rules and guidelines for learners to keep the platform safe from abuse and scam. You can set guidelines related to the use of a proper and respectful tone, welcoming others’ opinions positively, and acknowledging each other’s individuality.
Also Read: 15 Best Free Forum Plugins to Create WordPress Community Website
4. Ensure Specific Learning Objectives
Discussion tasks are another powerful way to engage your learners on online discussion forums. Engaging your online learners through group projects and tasks help them extend their limit and explore ideas that result in something unique. Discussions should be thoughtfully incorporated into the learning process and either related to specific learning outcomes to help learners achieve their goals. This will give important information that can be shared with students at the start of their course and used to set expectations.
5. Organize Online Events and Live Discussions
Organizing frequent community events is another approach to encourage learners’ engagement on your online discussion forums. One of the best things about a forum is unlimited discussions that go on for hours or even days, depending on how often individual participants check in. However, you can boost engagement and create enthusiasm by setting a time limit for certain activities. It helps make your discussion look more exciting and alive. However, you need to always make sure your audience benefits from these events. You can research the topics that interest them and set up new discussions around them. Also, subject-matter specialists can contribute and attract members.
Online Discussion Forum-Final Thoughts
Setting up and growing an online discussion forum requires great effort and thorough research. However, you can still make this happen with the help of a great plugin like LearnDash wpForo. Reduce your forum creation efforts and focus more on engagement strategies to ensure the best outcomes for your learners. The plugin comes with all the features you need to add a forum to your courses. Moreover, you can rely on a theme like LearnMate LearnDash for a quick setup of your e-learning website. Hence, you can now focus on your forum growth and audience engagements. Keep reading our frequent blogs for upcoming updates and forget to share your view with us in the comment section below.
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