Learning Infrastructure

Discussion Forum

Every course and club comes with a private forum, accessible to all course participants, past and present.

We also set up each cohort with its own private forum, accessible only to members of that specific cohort.

Introduce yourself, talk about interests, post questions, and gather feedback — anything you want to ask or share with other learners, the forum is the place to do it.

The Hyperlink community is powered by Discourse — modern, open source, highly flexible forum software. If you're new to Discourse, this is a great post covering the basics: Discourse New User Guide.

Video Calls

Since Hyperlink courses happen online and we can't all be in the same room, the next best thing is video calls — for group workshops, office hours, presentations, or anything else that calls for a live session.

Facilitators should schedule any live events for a course or club on its cohort page, adding event times, descriptions, and call links.

Learners can now create events from the cohort page too, either for everyone in the cohort or for specific participants. This may be useful for things like optional group work sessions or 1:1 meetings.

All your cohort events (for all your courses / clubs) will sync to your personal Hyperlink Calendar, which you can subscribe to here.

We recommend the following software:

• Zoom: popular and performant. Pros: widely used; works well even for large groups. Cons: requires a paid account for group calls > 40 minutes. We suggest using your own Zoom account if you have one, or get in touch with us to use a Hyperlink Zoom account.
• Google Meet: free and high-quality. A good solution for learner-created events, when you don't have a Pro Zoom account at hand.
• Jitsi: open source, runs in-browser on desktop (no download required), and a mobile app available. Pros: it's always free, with no time limits. Cons: tends to be less stable for larger groups, and a bit less polished.

Collaborative Tools

As noted, Hyperlink courses should be active — focused on collaboration and feedback with other learners. There are many tools that facilitate this sort of collaboration online, and you should use whichever fit the needs of your course.

Here are a few we recommend, all geared toward collaboration, and free for basic use:

• GitLab / GitHub: shared repositories for code…or other text that might have a use for collaborative version control!
• Google: Drive, Docs, Sheets, Forms, Slides, Meet and other free apps
• Notion: documents, wikis, to-do lists, database and task management
• Figma: design and prototyping
• Mural / Miro: visual workspace, shared whiteboarding
• Arena: group bookmarking, great for collecting resources and sharing ideas

Hyperlink Website

The Hyperlink platform itself is open source software. You can view the source code and submit changes if you find a bug!

See the README in the linked repo for more technical details about the site.