As you may or may not be aware, I am developing an Easy Law course for landlords (and agents and housing advisors too, if they want it!).
Last time I told you about some of the software I am using in its development. But what about a discussion area? Shouldn’t there be somewhere the students can discuss the course and ask questions?
I ummed and ah’d about this for quite a bit. Maybe, I thought, we could use the comments section at the end of the course wordpress pages? But then I decided not to use the wordpress site for most of the content, but to do separate html pages.
I am using the membership software Amember to protect the course content, and this integrates with a number of different types of forum software. But I don’t know much about any of them, so I have decided to do something a bit different.
Doing something different
On the cpanel for the hosting company I use for my blogs, Ecowebhosting, there is a huge selection of open source software that you can instal at the click of a button. A couple of years ago I noticed a link, right at the bottom of the page for installing something called Elgg. Elgg? What could that be?
A search on the internet showed that Elgg was a fully fledged social media software, used by companies all over the world to create discussion sites. For example it is used by the University of Brighton. Intrigued, I did a few test installations, and then set up a site to be a discussion site for myself and some lawyer friends. We had great fun with it.
So when I was thinking about the discussion area for Easy Law, I kept coming back to Elgg (named after a village in Switzerland apparently). So this is what I am going to use.
Behind the back door
Not wanting to clog up the main site too much, I have installed it in a directory on the .com domain I bought for School for Landlords, fronted by what I am now calling to myself the SFL ‘back door’. See it here.
Elgg has moved on since I installed the lawyers site, and this is a later version. It was exciting installing it and looking around to see what had changed. It is a really nice piece of software and I am surprised that more people don’t use it.
The heart and soul of the system is the groups feature. You can set up lots of different discussion groups on different topics. I am going to be doing one for each of my course modules, but students will be able to set up their own if they like. The software also supports blogs, bookmarking, private messaging, and a sitewide twitter style messaging system called ‘the Wire’.
But if you want to find out more you will have to join the course ;). It is still open for the ⅓ off Early Bird subscriptions, but this will be closing soon. You can find out more here.