By Jake Samuelson, Sr. Product Manager at Coursera
Learning is a continual process of getting stuck and unstuck. On Coursera, we want to make it as easy as possible for you to get unstuck – and one of the best resources we offer is our discussion forums, where learners from all over the world come together to share ideas, insights, and helpful information.
If you go to the discussion forums to seek help, we want you to find an answer as efficiently as possible. With that goal in mind, we’re excited to introduce a feature — highlighted posts — to help you more easily discover helpful answers in the forums.
Now, when you ask a question by starting a new forum thread, you’ll be able to return to the thread later to highlight the most helpful response you received (forum moderators can also highlight helpful posts on any thread). The highlighted post will be highlighted with a banner, and will be moved to appear above other replies. When you highlight a post, you’re essentially saying, “Wow! That was really helpful and I want to make sure other people with the same question see that post.”
Let’s take an example. When I sat down to create this blog post, I wanted to make a short embeddable video (GIF) to illustrate the new feature. While I’ve seen my fair share of GIFs, I had never actually made one. I decided today was the day!
At Coursera we use our own products to collaborate, so I posted on an internal employee discussion forum:
A few minutes later, my colleagues starting replying with suggestions. Some replies were more helpful than others. Thankfully, one of the posts was exactly what I needed. To illustrate the feature and to prove that the suggestion was helpful, I created a GIF to highlight the helpful post:
Thanks William Bowers!
We hope you find this tool useful as you look for answers in the forums. And please help your fellow learners by highlighting the best responses that you receive!