The Education Cloud Forums

We’ve recently released a new piece of functionality for our client Education Umbrella, their smart education resources platform The Education Cloud (TEC) now has a forum function that opens up a new range of features to users.

The Education Cloud platform provides a wide range of educational resources to teachers and students in a cloud based digital format. There’s more information on that project in our portfolio but here we’re focusing in on a major development that adds forum functionality to the existing platform along with options to ask specific questions and get answers about lessons and elements of the curriculum as well as setup study groups.

Once a user is signed in they can see their library of Education Cloud resources, this can include digital versions of text books, lesson plans, past exam papers, video and audio files. Next to each is an option to “View Forum” which opens up a list of questions and discussion points from other users. Users can see which threads have answers and can ask their own questions, submitting them either openly to the whole forum or privately to a closed study group.

Study groups can be setup between users or by teachers with their class. Take Macbeth for example, if you have a digital copy in your Education Cloud library, clicking on it reveals a list of questions that have already been openly asked including “Is Macbeth or Lady Macbeth the real villain?”, “Why is it bad luck to say Macbeth?”. If what you need to know isn’t there you can create your own question and edit it to add more detail if required. Once created, others can reply with answers and you can comment to thank them or ask for more details, it’s also possible to mark answers as correct and most helpful. In this way the forum feature encourages collaborative learning between students by building a supportive community.

With so much information available there is a powerful search feature which allows users to quickly locate the info that they need and find out if anyone has asked similar questions before. The idea being that over time many people will ask the same questions and the community will be able to help by not only answering common questions but also helping out with the more unusual ones too.

As an agency we focus on helping our clients leverage the power of digital to deliver results. To do this we take time to get to know our clients entire business universe, identifying short, mid and long term objectives and how to achieve them. It’s an involved process that takes time, effort and resource from both us and our clients however we feel that it’s the best way of working as it delivers a better more strategic approach and results.

This project is a prime example of where custom website developments that are part of a strategic roadmap can make a real difference to the overall user experience of a site. If you have a project in mind contact us.