Updated Courses Page (March 2019)

Tech
#1

Last year, we started gathering more feedback from facilitators and learners through a survey at the end of each learning circle. We have enough data now to start using that feedback to give facilitators more information and insight on the courses we show on our Courses page.

We’re planning to add course ratings and community feedback to the course cards so you can see at a glance what facilitators and learners thought about the course. We’ve come up with four different options for what the cards could look like. Here’s the mockup, please feel free to post your thoughts or preferences!
COURSE CARDS.pdf (219.7 KB)

We’re also planning to add an expanded page for each course that includes more information about the course, more detailed feedback from the surveys, comments from the discussion forum, and recommendations for similar courses.
Here’s the mockup, what do you think? Is there anything missing, or anything that’s not clear?
COURSE PAGE.pdf (173.0 KB)

If you have any other suggestions on how we can make it easier for facilitators to find and select a course, please feel free to post them here!

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🌚 Fri Oct 18 2019 — P2PU Course Cleanup!
🌚 Fri Mar 15 2019 — Community Call: Finding and Reviewing Online Courses
🌚 Fri Oct 18 2019 — P2PU Course Cleanup!
#2

@sharon this is looking great!

I really like the updated community feedback part on course page. What color will the bars for the rating be if there are 1 and 2 star ratings?

For the course cards, I like the colors, but I also like the square cards (aka buttons and labels inside the card) of the less colorful ones.

#3

I was thinking that the colours on the bar chart for ratings would be the four brand colours, and the last one for 1 stars could be the dark teal colour.

We can try putting the buttons inside the card on the colourful cards. My reasoning is that when the card is coloured and the buttons are coloured, the buttons don’t stand out, so having them extending from the card makes them more visible.

#4

That sounds good to me. I looked over everything again and don’t have any additional comments. It’s all looking good!

#5

I think the additional feedback options are terrific! Do you think you could possibly add some groupings by general subject? Here is an example:

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#6

These are great! For the cards, I really like the first one because it offers more information about the course than the others, but is still easy to read and understand. Also, I do like the colorful backgrounds, as long as they don’t make it hard to read the words!

As for the course page itself, the one thing that jumped out at me is the line about it being “good for beginners”. Is this beginner facilitators or beginner learners? Since I’m looking at the page as a facilitator, that makes me think of facilitators first, I guess? I doubt it makes a difference if you’re a first time facilitator, but I’ll ask the question anyway. Otherwise, I really like this page, including the colorful graph of everyone’s thoughts!

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#7

Everyone is invited to join further discussion on this topic and feature on Friday March 15. Full community call details are available here:

#8

Feedback from our Community Call (March 15, 2019)

Good

  • Now very easier to sort
  • Filters are a big improvement
  • Major advancement from the first-course page
  • Ensure “self-paced” “ready to use at any time” are prominent

Could be improved

  • Browse by general topic, or broader topic areas (ESL, Basic Introduction to HTML) or have a way for showing groups of similar topics. For example, if you click “basic computer skills”, you should be able to see other courses that are similar. It might also be interesting to see the number of courses that are available under a broader topic area.
  • Make it easier to compare similar courses It is difficult to get a sense of what the difference is between similar course topics, both using class central/ coursera and p2pu course page.
  • More information about the timing of courses. For example, it would be good to know how the facilitator used this course in a learning circle (3 hours of week for 8 weeks) or what the facilitator would suggest for how much time would be needed to go through the entire courses if they were to use the same course again.
  • Bring back the “check mark” to indicate the number of learning circles
  • "Tagdorsements" (Ex: “Good for Beginners”). This is good to see in the more detailed course card page but not needed as a filter. Right now there are not many courses that have this feedback and seem very subjective, so the data may not useful to search through until larger data set is available.
  • Filter or tag for “basic adult education” or “foundational”: It would be helpful to find courses can work for those without a college level degree or low-literacy. Suggested tags: Adult basic literacy, Adult basic education, Adult secondary education, Adult ESL/ESOL (for immigrants learning english as a second or other language)

Questions

  • Enrollment details: Could it be possible to see which course enrollment dates are coming up so we can plan accordingly?
  • Non “course-related” material: How can we feature course-related resources that might support a course (assessment resources, videos, learning apps)?
  • Can an app be featured on the course list? How can we accommodate courses that don’t look like traditional MOOC courses?
  • Can the course page feature proprietary platforms (lynda, gale)? Ex: If I see a course from Learning Express that has worked well for a learning circle, I might be more interested to pay for this service to gain access to the course.
    • Be able to filter or search by specific platforms as organizations are already subscribed.

Bigger ideas

  • Custom Team Course Pages: System-wide or custom course list for organizations. This could provide a list of courses that organizations already have access to (proprietary vendors like lynda/gale), that could be used by system librarians to choose from. Ideal for organizers to feature a list of courses that have worked well for the team already.
    • Features courses system has access to like Gale/Lynda.
    • Creates a simple list that could be shared internally.
    • Allows organizations to keep a record of specific courses that have worked well and their use.
    • It might also be interesting to be able to search to see which organizations/teams have done which courses

Thanks for joining! @aoliveras @David_Rosen @Marsha @Qumisha_Goss @sharon @Steph_Miller @Athanasia_Fitos

#9

Hi I just wanted to give you all an update on the new courses page, which is live now!

Here’s a quick summary of the updates on the Courses Search page:

  • You can now see an aggregated star rating for the courses that have reviews from facilitators and/or learners.
  • The course cards are redesigned to show a combination of information about the course and community feedback
  • You can click on the course topic tags on any course card to see other courses with the same topic tag.
  • You can now filter courses by language, OER licensing, and you can sort the courses by popularity, rating, and date added.

We also added a new page for each course that gives more details about the course and the community feedback it has received. You get to this page by clicking “More Details” on the course card. This page shows:

  • Additional details about the course, including the link to the course platform
  • Detailed breakdown of the course ratings and descriptive tags from other facilitators
  • Discussion and reviews from other facilitators
  • Suggestions for similar courses

Here’s an example of a course page for the Basic Computer Skills course: https://learningcircles.p2pu.org/en/course/263/

I also want to thank you for all the feedback and input during the design process, I hope you find the new changes useful! Please feel free to leave any additional comments in this thread, especially if anything comes up as you start using the new search page.

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