LMS Forums enlighten the path to engage learners with online courses and to promote the benefits of social learning environment.
No matter, whether you are an individual trainer, a school or university, an institute or a coach, you always look for the best way to make your students learn the concepts. Due to the evolution of Learning Management Systems, there has been a shift in education trends. With the ease of sharing as well as grabbing knowledge from the comfort of home, eLearning becomes the preference of most instructors and students.
But we can’t forget the term “Social Learning” when we are talking about education. Social Learning throws light on the concept that students tend to observe and learn more effectively than trying to grab knowledge in isolation. And, in the eLearning industry, LMS Forums play a great role in letting students get on board on the same platform for discussions and social activities.
In this article, I’m going to introduce the concept of social learning theory, how LMS forums facilitate eLearning and how to get started with your first LMS forum.
Recalling Social Learning Theory By Albert Bandura
Training requires interactivity and engagement of learners. Incorporating the environment of social learning is the best practice to engage learners with your courses. The reason behind this fact is that everyone wants to be recognized in society. They try to observe others and try to do the same or in a better way. And, LMS forums, gamification, webinars, and other engagement practices do their best to solve this purpose.
According to Canadian-American Psychologist Albert Bandura,
“People learn from observation, imitation, and modeling. It simply means that people tend to observe others behavior and attitude and apply the same in their life. They tend to replicate the actions and emotions of people who are around them at a particular point of time to develop an understanding of a behavior or attitude.”
Here is how LMS Forums solve the purpose of eLearning.
How Does Social Learning Theory Fit In eLearning
An online forum allows discussions to take place. Think about Quora, a widely used online discussion forum. It simply allows people to ask questions and give answers. That’s how an online forum benefits. So, if you’re running an LMS site, integrating it with an LMS forum is of great help to your students. As they can easily discuss on a particular topic to seek further information.
Let’s understand it in the context of social learning theory.
The theory majorly focuses on 4 Principles:
- Attention: The theory says that a person needs to stay focused while learning. Hence, while learning online, you need to make sure your students are focused. With group discussions, you can easily grab a collective attention of your students.
- Retention: Learners should have the ability to recall information in order to perform actions. You need to make sure your learning modules are interesting and clear enough to understand the concepts. Through group activities, retention power can boost up to the most extent.
- Reproduction: The theory implies that reproducing and repeating an action allows getting a better cognitive hold on the subject matter. Hence, you need to make sure your learners are trying out your learning objectives themselves. No doubt, group discussion is the best way to do it.
- Motivation: Observers are more likely to follow the footsteps of a person who has been awarded for his actions. These rewards help to motivate them. Similarly, through LMS forums, you can motivate your students by making their actions recognized publicly.
How To Get Started With LMS Forum
For those who are running LearnDash Powered WordPress LMS website, Integrating a forum on their eLearning site is really very simple. All you need is just wpForo Forum and Learndash wpForo Plugins. Let’s have a quick understanding of both the plugins:
wpForo Forums
wpForo Forums is a forum plugin for WordPress that offers responsive and modern styled forum layouts. It has been designed for small and extremely large forums and communities and is compatible with the most popular WordPress membership plugins like BuddyPress and Ultimate Members plugins. It comes with built-in forum SEO functions, Sitemap and Search Engine ping, cache system, Antispam and Akismet integration.
Learndash wpForo: #1 WordPress Plugin To Create LMS Forums
LearnDash wpForo is an add-on plugin for LearnDash Powered LMS sites. It allows increasing your learners’ engagement with your courses through forum discussions.
It offers you various options to set up a forum on your WordPress LMS. For example, you can decide to whom your forums will be visible, custom message to display access limitation, allow read-only access, and a lot more features to explore.
And, here is how to get started with LearnDash wpForo:
4 Major Components Of LMS Forums That You Should Consider
Forums are for discussions. Discussions can be on any topic depending on the matter of subject in question. Therefore, each forum is unique in terms of their specific purpose including their own set of rules.
Other than the purpose to create an online forum, you should take care of these 4 major components that make up a forum complete:
- An organized structure to perform discussions on the subject matter in question.
- User profiles for Students to reveal their identity and role in discussions.
- Features to respond, add to a topic and provide feedback.
- Moderation to ensure appropriate discussions and topics.
All these features contribute to LMS forums to make discussions more meaningful and powerful.
Incorporate Social Learning To Your LMS Site Today With LMS Forums!
That’s all about how the LMS forum facilitates eLearning. So, if you want to engage your students with your eLearning platform, you should focus on how well you can let them have a discussion on a particular subject matter. The more they will discuss, the more they will interact and the more they will learn.
The choice is yours! whether you want your learners to get engaged with your online courses or not!
Leave a comment below if you have any doubts or suggestions. We’ll get back to you with a satisfactory solution.
