[Poll] What to do about SLU?

[CAM-Gerlach]

@cameron

I suspect there’s some benefit to the student of having posted here once to get past that “can I disturb people?” threshold. How much I don’t know.

Perhaps, but it doesn’t seem to be very effective, at least judging by the Jan 16-18 batch. As mentioned over on the other thread:

@CAM-Gerlach

Of the 18 students who posted in the Jan 16-18 batch (all but one of which appeared to be from a Spanish-language variant of the COM 302 Python course), none of them have posted anything further since then, and all have read times from <1 to 25 minutes, most in the single digit range. The apparent odd one out was a student who did have one other post—another previous welcome from a different academic period, which suggests they either had to retake the course, or there are multiple courses that require this.

There were some mentioned on the other thread:

@Quercus

Students who become seriously engaged in learning Python could benefit from this or other forums after they have gained some knowledge of Python. The instructor could facilitate this by asking the students to also look at the pages referenced above that explain the workings of this forum. Then, later in the course, the instructor could return their attention to the forum by looking at some selected discussions that are interesting because they represent examples of how to use and how not to use a forum, or ones that feature an interesting problem or algorithm. The students can then be invited, purely optionally, to post to the Python Help category if, and only if, they are ready to ask a good question or provide a good answer, with any posted code properly formatted, of course.

@Quercus

It might be best if the instructor discontinued the requirement that each student open an account. Instead, after the students have reached a stage of learning later in the course when they are asking good questions, the instructor could inform them about the forum, demonstrate how it can be used effectively by showing them some exemplary discussions, and leave it up to each student whether or not to create and use an account.

@Rosuav

I would actually love to see some kind of a course requirement that gets them to search existing posts. That doesn’t require a login, and it also encourages previous material to be read rather than treating every problem as “time to write a post”.