1.
WP 5 Learner support
framework
Support review and planning
Ioannis Stamelos/Vaios Kolofotias
Computer Science Department
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
2. OpenED today…
The Opened.eu platform has 5,009
visits since May 25, 2011 and an
average of 50 visitors per day.
There are 604 currently registered
users that interact with each other into
this active community.
It is expected that something can go
wrong, so the Learner support must be
a strong card for this platform.
3. Current Learner Support
The main tool facilitated by the OpenED platform for
helping learners is the Forum. Registered users can post
their questions there and either they are technical or course
related, they will get an answer as soon as possible.
There are, also, chat sessions at the beginning of every
module and during it, where tutors discuss with learners on
the course related issues.
6. Support Planning
Although the current support structure seems enough for the
demands of the community, we can add more
functionalities to improve it. That should lead to more
satisfied learners who will promote our project even further
through their circles.
7. F.A.Q(Frequently Asked
Questions)
“Frequently asked questions are listed questions and
answers, all supposed to be commonly asked in some
context, and pertaining to a particular
topic”(source:wikipedia).
There should be a page where we can all(tutors and technical
stuff) submit common learner questions and the answers
that we provide to them(concerning technical or learning
related issues).
8. F.A.Q(Frequently Asked
Questions) 2/2
This functionality merely exists in OpenED as we can see at
“How to start studying” under Help menu, but is limited
and concerns only the starting process.
The FAQ functionality proposed will have several topics
that concern users and questions & answers under them.
A proposed format follows
10. Questions & Answers 1/2
Another, more web 2.0, approach is to create a questions
and answers page which will work like this: A learner will
submit a question to a provided textfield and then other
users or us will answer on this question. There can be
several answers and users will vote the most accurate one.
The questions posted will be about the platform but they can
also expand to open education. With this move, we may
soon have some interesting data submitted by learners and
tutors that will help us improve the platform and study the
learners perspective on all these.
11. Questions & Answers 1/2
Users may also have the ability to share an answer to social
media like facebook,twitter etc, which will bring more
publicity to our platform.
Some popular examples of this idea are:
http://stackoverflow.com
http://answers.yahoo.com
14. Conclusion
Learners support at OpenED is quite satisfying at the moment
but if we would like to improve it the two proposals mentioned
will surely boost it a little more.
The F.A.Q although it’s a known and widely used method for
providing support is quite steady and does not promote user
interaction. It gathers all information together, which means it
would be more easy to browse.
At the other hand, questions and answers functionality will give
our platform a breath of fresh air and push users to interact with
each other and spend more time logged-in.
