Forum Subheader for MOOCs?

[Luxi]

There are many MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) offered by several 'Platforms' (partnerships of universities and institutions offering these courses), including some directly from China. They offer mostly free courses on a wide variety of topics, many of which are related to language and other aspects of Chinese studies. Some are taught in Chinese and can be an extremely useful resource in language learning, especially for students outside China.

 

Would it be possible to have a separate Sub-header for announcements and other posts related to these MOOCs so that they can be found more easily - and on time to register? 

 

[Angelina]

Udacity (WeChat official account: youdaxue) 

[roddy]

We really need less forums here, not more, we already have lots of inactive ones. I'm thinking about using tagging though, that might work, but it will rely on people editing the tags. 

[roddy]

Like This - I just did three that came up in a search, obviously there's more. The process of adding tags is a bit of a pain, as you've got to scroll through a list, unless we allow any tag to be added, in which case we get duplication and spelling mistakes (BNU, Beijing Normal, beishida, and that's before people start adding Chinese). 

[Luxi]

I understand what you mean about there being too many sub-forums.

 

We could try tagging and see how it goes.  I think most of the posts on moocs I remember reading here (mine included) have actually come up in your tag search, so it definitely works. But retrieving the information still needs an active, deliberate search, rather than something you see when just browsing. Searching for something you don't know is there is not something most people would do.

 

It'll also need posters remembering to use tags when starting a thread (free tagging is not a very good idea!). I can't remember ever using tags when posting here

 

 

 

 

 

[roddy]

That's because I've only turned them on today, and only for admin members!

 

Those topics are coming up because I've manually tagged them. Automatic tagging might be possible, but I can also see it getting a lot wrong. 

[Luxi]

And there I was searching all over the place for a well hidden icon for 'Tagging' !

 

(actually a straight search for 'mooc' would probably bring the same results with less hassle)

[roddy]

In this case, yes, as that's how I found them. But I bet there's other topics where people have posted about 'an online course' or 'something pretty cool on Coursera'. That's where you need the human curators.