32. Subgroups in Bulletin Boards

Recently, Itracks introduced the "Breakout Group" feature in BBFGs.

Essentially, researchers can assign participants in a bulletin board focus group to one or more sub-groups, like user and non-users, for instance. Different subgroups can then be asked different questions.

This can be very useful in any number of applications, including breakout sessions. For instance, users and non-users could be asked questions 1 through 3, and 6. Users (and only users) would in addition see question 4, while non-users (and only non-users) would be asked question 5.

The Breakout Group feature can even be used to run two or more parallel bulletin boards within one, at somewhat less cost and bother than running two separate bulletin boards.

I'd like to see a few more tweaks on this feature:

• Currently, there is no easy way to tell to what subgroup a participant belongs when viewing the discussion group; it might be interesting for Itracks to add the subgroup membership information to each participant's profile available from the "VIEW INFO" links on the main page
  
  
• Similarly, it might be useful if email recipients could be selected or sorted on the basis of their membership in subgroups, allowing the researcher to tailor his or her email transmissions to the needs of different subgroups
  
  
• There is no information about subgroup membership on the users' management page (to see to what subgroup a participant has been assigned, the researcher must navigate to the "Groups" page). It would be useful if Itracks were to provide a column indicating to which group a participant belongs on the Users' management page
  
  
• Finally, there is insufficient support for the subgroup feature in transcripts: there is no ability to filter the download by subgroup, nor are the individual posts identified originating from any sub-group.

There are, however, work-arounds to the last two of these shortcomings. Stay tuned.