Integrating Khoros for a Community of Online College Faculty

We are using the community platform to support online teachers located throughout the United States. The community platform is used as a central hub for communication, training, policy, interaction, and culture/engagement. We are the only department within the university currently using the platform. The platform helps us address the need of having one central space in which our online teachers throughout the country can have to interact and get the information they need to be the best teachers they can be. It also helps them feel connected to each other and to the university.

All of the customer support folks we've interacted with are great. We honestly haven't had too much interaction with services teams because there is an additional cost, and we don't have the budget/approval for it. Our account managers have always been understanding about this and have kindly reminded us of other services options without being overbearing. One somewhat negative experience is that we've been through 4 different account managers in the four years we've used the product. They've all been nice--some better than others. It would be nice for a little more stability, but we also understand that folks move around. Ultimately, it's not a deal-breaker or turns us off from using the product.

Moderation tools, content management, and especially analytics are all great. They give us actionable, simple reports and metrics when we need them. Truth be told, we can be a little more strategic about how we implement this information, but I have no doubt that as we better strategize, the data that we need to do so is available.

Yes, there are a handful of our users who are quite driven by the gamifcation aspects of the community. They like receiving badges and ranking up. And what's nice is that we can identify future leaders through their progress and involvement in the community (among other metrics). We have a decent super-user program, but those decisions aren't solely based on community involvement. We also look through how effective those instructors are in their online courses.