LS5.0 Discussion Board woes

[snaggle]

We have upgraded in ou alst semester from LS3.5 fourms to LS5.0 core and collab suites. Now our students and instructors are revolting against the LS5.0 discussion board. It turns out that there is a lot less functionality in the stock 5.0 discussion database than in the 3.5 CourseRoom db. For instance, 5.0 lacks:

- Privacy between users.
Students used to submit assignments as attachments in CourseRoom messages and submit them as a private message to their instructor. Now the privacy feature is useless, it hides messages, even from the adminstrator
- No user heirarchy.
The LS admin is just another guy in the databases. The only thing I can do is delete or edit, instructors and admin used to be able to see ALL messages in 3.5
- Cruddy Java.
Okay, granted it woks great on my Win2000 box over DSL. But our students are dialing up on not-so-great computers, though they fill the minimum sys requirements...and they can't use it.
- Organization of threads
One long list? Before, new messages were marked in red and there was an icon for instructor messages. We could sort by date, author, subject all in one view. Now, it's a long list of expaned threads that gets hard to maintain.

Apparently Lotus/IBM sacrificed a lot of usuability in order to include the stupid Rich text applet in there. Am I alone in feeling this way? What are your experiences with it. We are thinking of tossing the whole discussion db and going with a homegrown domino db or something like vBulletin that is more HTML-based.

Granted, we are a school, so some of these features may not be as important in a corporate environment, but there is major public outcry here for the return of the CourseRoom functionality. What do you guys think?

http://elearning.fidm.edu

 

[sway]

Hi Snaggle,

I agree completely with your assessment of LearningSpace's discussion board. All the issues that you have brought up are exactly the same ones that our students and faculty have complained about.

I really believe that you hit the nail on the head when you say that Lotus seems to be gearing more towards the Corporate environment instead of the academic end, though people from Lotus have denied this whole heartedly.

So you are not alone. I have been able to fix some of these problems (like the expanding list) but it seems that we are always trying to find shortcuts to meet our needs, which is a very time consuming ordeal.

So between the rotten discussion board, the weak assessment package and the fact that they will not support MACs, we are pretty much being forced to look at other applications. Too bad.

Sway

 

[snaggle]

There definitely needs to be some more input from higher-ed users like us...

We were actually thinking about piggybacking a more full-featured discussion board package on top of LS, looking at vBulletin or a home-grown CourseRoom clone using Domino. That way we have full rights to assign different levels of permissions, start up global rooms, etc. Our students are more apt to "hang out" on a discussion board instead of asking pointed questions to an instructor...just a facet of our audience (college students). I think we would benefit more from a nice quick Perl system were users can have avatars, profiles, buddy lists, etc.

I do like LS for the organization of courseware and Sametime features, but the discussion board (and, yes, assessments too) feel like an afterthought to me.

Everyone, please add your thoughts, I am making a sh*tlist of stuff to send of to Lotus and our ASP...any input?

http://elearning.fidm.edu