Excuse me if my question is not posted to the right place.
I am surprised that there is not a discussion in Bulgarian in the list of community discussions in other languages, because there was one a few months ago.
Does anybody know what happened and what must be done to open that discussion again?
Hello there. I'm sorry you're missing the Bulgarian community discussions. Currently Moodle.org is being reorganised and some courses which weren't being used much are being closed. There is a tracker issue on it here http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDLSITE-1875 and if you click the link to the Google doc on there https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmamVlPpCnn4dFRVcHhtZG8wa2ZxdmU1UDRoM3BWZ0E
you can see that the Bulgarian course was very quiet -in fact, only one person had posted there in the last three months. So Daniel the facilitator agreed that it should be closed. All the content is available from MOOCH here so nothing is lost.
Of course - if you believe you can get loads of Bulgarian speaking Moodlers to have a lively discussion area then I am sure the course can come back
I may be quite wrong of course Mary, but this seems really bad form.
If a community forum exists, and there is thought of shutting it down, then we can post a message to the effect "Is anyone using this, do you mind if we shut you down?"
If there is no response, that is an answer. If there is one response, that is an answer. etc. The reason why this interests me comes back to my first ever hotline I set up with students. The demand seemed very high. The use was very low. The feedback at the end of the year was superb. One student told me "I never used it, but I sometimes heard from my friends what they had found out, and I liked knowing it was there" It's the rubber duck syndrome in a way: you have no hotline so you worry what to do with a problem. You have a hotline so you think "What shall I say,?" and in the process of thinking, sometimes get an answer.
Of course, if it was a burden to Daniel, that is another issue. You do need a moderator for this kind of thing.
I kind of have this romantic view that Moodle.og should be everywhere. Even Bulgaria. If it's low use, just ready for the day when it is needed in a hurry in a big way.
In principle, do you tell people ahead of time what is going to happen with Moodle.org or do we just find out?
-Derek
Thank you for the answer, Mary.
I know that there are many moodle users in Bulgaria. I am a university lecturer and I maintain a moodle site for our university (my.vsu.bg). I know that almost all universities in Bulgaria have moodle sites and there are many other moodle sites owned by schools and firms. I think it will be good if all Bulgarian speaking moodle users could find something to read in their native language on moodle.org. If they could easy find a discussion area they will be active to send posts there.
On the page of Bulgarian moodle course there were some other resources which were very old. Links to forums were somewhere near the bottom of the page and one could not find them. The reason for little number of posts was that very few people could find the discussion. I told this to Daniel in my posts but he did not do anything to improve the page.
I will appreciate if a new course in Bulgarian will be created on moodle.org and I am ready to become a course facilitator.
Hi Mary,
That low interaction could be happening because users don't find the forum in their language or because they find it but as they don't see much action they come here instead. I recently answered a post from someone from Bulgaria:
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=211028
Maybe it would be interesting to make a survey to ask participants if they use forums in their own language and if not, to explain why not (or to select from some possible answers).
Vanyo, thanks for your interest in community discussion in Bulgarian. As Mary mentioned, the Bulgarian community discussion course was closed recently due to lack of activity. However, as Mary also mentioned, we can reopen the course or create a new one if you think there is a need. Thanks for volunteering to be course facilitator. I will be in touch.
In general, we're happy to provide community discussion courses on moodle.org in whatever languages people would like. Each language is unique though, and some Moodlers choose to discuss Moodle in other places, for example Czech Moodlers use moodle.cz. This is, of course, absolutely fine.
In order to thrive, a community discussion course needs a core of committed participants and at least one facilitator. Unused community discussion courses attract spammers and are confusing for newcomers.
Derek, please be reassured that I have posted messages in courses prior to closing them, and when there has been a positive response, the course has remained open. In most cases though, there has been no response. Thanks for asking the question "do you tell people ahead of time what is going to happen with Moodle.org or do we just find out?". Apologies for not being forthcoming enough with information up to now. I'm resolving to post about improvements in the moodle.org design forum from now on.
Guillermo, I agree with your possible reasons for low interaction in community discussion courses. One of the improvements we're planning for moodle.org is to feature useful forum posts in a user's language (as defined in their browser settings) on the front page of moodle.org, so when they first visit moodle.org, before they even log in, they are presented with links to discussions in their own language. Hopefully this will result in greater participation in community discussion courses in different languages.
Update: Vanyo now has facilitator rights to the Bulgarian community discussion course and will be reopening it soon after making some improvements.
I'm just going to move this discussion thread to the moodle.org design forum so that forum subscribers there are informed.