1. The Problem and What Contributes to It:
Currently, eLC's discussion board has a complex UI and is not user-friendly. It lacks important features such as private posts, a search field, organized posts by date, individual response threads, and anonymous posting. Because eLC’s UI is difficult to use and lacks these important features, many professors turn to outside sources. The use of a secondary site causes further issues such as having the potential for students to break their focus or their workflow, where for the majority of their other classes, eLC is their sole resource
2. Affordances: Piazza vs. eLC:
Piazza has affordances typical to what would be found in a general centralized discussion board like what you may find in an online forum. The idea being that anyone can make a post on a particular subject matter and it would be done so in a hierarchical way, sorted by last updated date. Piazza “one-ups” this by facilitating the use of a side-bar with all of the relevant subject matters on the left side, with the individual posts on the right side, leading to a hassle-free UX for the end-user (Instructors, TAs, Students).
Comparing what Piazza offers to what eLC has available, the differences are clear in the sort of affordances they offer. The discussion topic has to be pre-populated in the discussion board by the Instructor or TA, leading to a narrow-focus on the type of questions, posts that can be posted on the discussion board. Additionally, one major feature that eLC lacks is an all-in-one search field, where all posts in the class can be searched for key information. While eLC contains a feature-rich set of tools for instructors to use, the overall implementation even with these advanced tools, leads to a confusing UI. This causes more Instructors to use Piazza as a result, even if it has less advanced features compared to eLC. The takeaway is that, you can have a million and one features, but if they are clunky and unintuitive, less people will use your product, even if it can do substantially more.
3. Who It Affects and Why It’s a Problem:
The stakeholders impacted include students, faculty (professors, TAs), and eLC investors/developers. Forum-based tools are important because in discussion-based classes, class efficiency and engagement can be optimized with a good quality tool. The majority of classes that utilize discussion boards, in our experience, don’t use the eLC discussion board. For example, most Computer Science courses use Piazza. To use Piazza, students must create a separate login - this means that when faculty use both Piazza and eLC, students have to check two websites for information. Using multiple platforms can become cumbersome and the switch in UI to another website outside the normalcy of eLC can be a break in HCI engagement for students. Using multiple platforms is also inconvenient for faculty. Faculty now need to manage the eLC and Piazza content - not just a single platform. Additionally, Piazza has a separate support/ticket system for issues outside of eLC, meaning if there is an issue, eLC support staff may not be able to help. For stakeholders that financed the development of the eLC system, the course content view is heavily used, but the discussion board trails in comparison. Stakeholders may want to redesign or stop implementing and maintaining this feature if statistics show low usage.
4. How It Relates to Face-to-Face Instruction:
This is not unique to Face-to-Face interaction, but instead, it applies equally to all sorts of instructional methods given the nature of discussion boards and the value they provide. Discussion boards allow the extension of discussions in class to an online environment while students are not physically in the classroom which further stimulates the overall discussions of course materials, assignments, etc. both inside the classroom and out.
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