Today I received a good reminder that it’s always good to do testing in advance.
My online courses always have a discussion component. In the past, I used the built-in Forum capability of our Learning Management System, Canvas. Last year, I used a new tool called Yellowdig.
This year, I was planning to try another new tool called Notebowl, but I’ve figured out that it does not allow any editing of posts after saving. As someone who makes lots of typos herself and often edits and re-saves her micro.blog posts 5 times (even though I write them in Ulysses first and supposedly don’t post them to micro.blog until they are “final”), I felt that this behavior would cause undue frustration for my students. The point of discussion in my course is to have a social learning environment, with plenty of sharing. If everyone has to get each post perfect before saving, I think that would reduce the “ease” of our discussion.
So I’ve ditched Notebowl and we’ll use Yellowdig again this year.