While taking part in the VLEs: Beyond The Fringe… And Into The Mainstream it occured to me that the discussion group software could be better from the ‘reading’ point of view.

In fact, had the discussion group had an rss feed, I could have read the postings in a much more convenient fashion, and kept up with the 4 separate discussions that were going on.

I’d got further than this though. RSS obviously doesn’t quite serve the needs of bulletin boards (threading, sequencing etc.), but surely it wouldn’t be difficult to define discussion groups as xml output rather than html, and have a simple messaging format to be able to post as well as read posts.

It’s just occured to me, that, of course, the existing news readers do this – so why are e-learning systems not delivering standard bulletin board formats so I can ‘subscribe’ in my news reader? On the other hand, does discussion board software from outside the e-learning sphere support this? What are the problems?

It suddenly seemed clear to me that if in the future (as some people suggest) learners will be more picky about where they do qualifications, and they will buy courses online from a variety of sources, they will need some way to ‘aggregate’ their courses in a single environment (rather than the current practice where each institution is running their own ‘learning environment’, and if the user is going to take courses from 2 institutions, they have to interact with 2 learning environments).

Since there is also talk of ‘exploding’ the VLE/LMS into it’s components parts, and discussion board system which is readable by a standard news reader seems like a sensible idea? I’m just wondering about how complex it needs to get… Perhaps a bulletin board software supporting RSS is a better idea? I’ve gone round in a circle on this – obviously needs more thought and research.