BLEND-ONLINE] Looking for private, Reddit-style vote up/down discussion tool

From: The EDUCAUSE Blended and Online Learning Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:BLEND-ONLINE@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU] On Behalf Of Sharon Strauss
Sent: Friday, June 03, 2016 10:46 AM
To: BLEND-ONLINE@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [BLEND-ONLINE] Looking for private, Reddit-style vote up/down discussion tool

Hello,

Thanks for all the online and offline responses. A quick summary of where I am with this project, and the various solutions offered.

Piazza–Piazza will integrate with our LMS via LTI and we do have it. As far as I can tell, after some initial enthusiasm for it a few years ago, nobody here has been using. Thus, I cannot speak to the spam issue that Nina raised. Still, I looked at it and do not see any vote up/down option on it. It is structured more as a Q & A organizer. There is an option for professors to rate an answer as good or bad, but that it is different from a popular vote.

WordPress Theme or Plugin–I found a couple of vote up/down WordPress solutions. However, as far as I can tell, none are actively maintained. The most recent I saw is a couple of years old.

Google Moderator–This looks like it may have been just what we want, but Google retired the program last year. Currently you just get the message, “We’ve retired Google Moderator. The site is no longer available in any form, but you can get to data from past Moderator series through our “Download your Data” tool.

Brightspace–May work for those that have it, but we do not.

Canvas–Perhaps another area where it beats Moodle. However, we do not have it and I’m not sure we want to get it at this time.

Drupal–This might work! I did not see an up/down vote option with http://skill-tree.org, but it seems there are a few options.  I’m looking into this further.
Commercial options–I got suggestions for commercial software such as http://crowdicity.com and https://www.uservoice.com/. Both seem like they could work, but I don’t know if we have a budget for this.

FYI, I got more detail from the professor about the project. I learned he is not looking for a classroom solution. He is looking to lead a potentially sensitive and controversial campus-wise conversation. Thus, this might not be the best place to have posted. Still, maybe someone else on the list will also find this useful.

-Sharon

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Sharon Strauss
Instructional Technology Services
IITS
Haverford College
sstrauss@haverford.edu
610-896-4916