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Coursera: Forum Refresh: Coming Soon to a Class Near You
When most people think of Coursera, they think about the video lectures, the quizzes,and the peer-graded assignments. But there is another part which we think is equally important: the discussion forums. That’s where students debate what they’ve learnt in class, where instructors see what creative things their students have done on the side, where community TAs help guide students through problems, and where students give feedback about improving the platform and course. We’ve been collecting feedback from students and instructors about the forums, and finally found the time to start addressing that feedback. To start with, we realized that we want to be able to iterate quickly on our forums in the future, so we’ve re-written the forum codebase to use a more modern architecture and web technologies (it’s now a Backbone single-page web app, for the techies out there). Along with that re-writing, we’ve addressed some of the top usability c…