Discussion forums hierarchy

Owned by Joel Johnson
Aug 05, 2020
2 min read

Generic

  • Admin

  • Moderator(s)

  • Members

Guiding principle

Get me an answer to my question with the highest bias allotted for my language and context (cluster, district, state) followed by anyone who can answer that question.

MVP 

MVP to be guided by what the forum software is basically capable of, out of the box with minimum custom configuration.

Structures

School

State Secretary for education ⇒ DSERT Secretary ⇒ BEO, BRT ⇒ CRP ⇒ Principal ⇒ Teacher ⇒ Student

Abstract hierarchy within forum (priority)

1st level [Forum1, Forum2, Forum3] | 2nd level [Forum 4, Forum5, Forum6]

Forum tags (Tenant, publisher, purpose, subject, book, participants [teacher/student/resource person], geo)

Post tags (above + user details, e.g. geo of user, type of user)

  • Control hierarchy is single parent only

  • Visibility hierarchy can have multiple parents

Forum1, Forum2,.. Forum 5

  • Forum2 ← Forum1

  • Forum3 ← Forum2

Base hierarchy

Nation(Instance) ⇒ State(Tenant) ⇒ District ⇒ Block ⇒ Cluster  ⇒ School

Secondary hierarchy (Professional development)

Course sponsor ⇒ State ⇒ District ⇒ Batch x

Self-organizing structures (peer-created discussion forums)

Nation (Instance) ⇒ State / Tenant ⇒ Ground-up forum

Nation (instance) ⇒ Nation general category ⇒ Stand-alone forum

Examples

Example1

Content created by Karnataka

TN book

Maharashtra book

  • Discussion forum (1) → TN book level

  • Discussion forum (2) → MH book level

  • Discussion forum (3) → Content level

If I’m a TN user.

TN book level forum

  • Content level forum

  • Other tenant’s forum (MH, AP, *)

Browsing forums as a TN teacher

  • Cluster level forum

  • Block level forum

  • District level forum

  • TN level forum

Cluster level forum will include discussions from books within the TN tenant from that cluster

(sort by by the hierarchy publisher in content forums, followed geo forum hierarchy)

Example2

Content (standalone) forum (E.g. English grammar do_123 forum)

Content (tenant) forum (e.g. English grammar do_123 AP Book1 forum, English grammar do_123 MH Book1 forum)

 

Query cost to be checked:

  1. Categories at a book level with tags per contentID

  2. Categories at a content level, which can be aggregated for visibility under a book category.

 

To answer query costs for the following:

  1. Popular questions in my state context for my class/subject

  2. Popular questions at a content level (organized by state, and others i.e. across all publishers)