Forcing people to use the Landing because it is required on a course goes much against the grain and is, indeed, entirely out of kilter with connectivist thinking. I am guilty of it for several courses, because it does make a great learning platform if you want to gain the benefits of the presence of others and give learners greater control. But, in using the Landing to try to make my courses better and empowering my students that use it, I fear I am doing damage to the Landing itself.

There is an argument to be made that being here for a course is a gateway that might draw people in so that they contribute, and continue to contribute, beyond the course. The big problem with that argument is that, as long as force is applied, people will engage but, as soon as that force is removed, they will stop doing so. Worse, if they are made to use it for one thing, they will mostly be disinclined to use it for anything else. Extrinsic motivation kills intrinsic motivation. This is basic self-determination theory writ large, and it does seem to be borne out by what we actually see (and by what I saw in community@brighton, a precursor of the Landing I was involved with in the UK). A few people are inspired and motivated to continue to engage, but they are quite a small minority, overall. 

I'd be really interested in a study that uncovered in more detail what makes that minority persist. I am fairly sure, from observation and theory, that one of the biggest reasons is diversity of primary uses (inspiration here from Jane Jacobs as well as more generic ecology and biodiversity). One of the consistent factors in ongoing participation seems to be that people find other things and other people to engage with outside of their courses, centres, or whatever.

I've pushed really hard from the start that there must be many reasons for being here if the Landing is to be more than a useful adjunct to Moodle.  It's as a learning commons, not as a delivery tool for courses, that the Landing's greatest potential value lies. Courses - fixed-length chunks with specified assessed outcomes - are a contingent and unnecessary cross that education continues to bear thanks to its past evolution, and they really get in the way of learning. It would be a lot different if, say, we thought of them more like clubs or communities of people with shared interests, without fixed goals and schedules, and without coercion to drive their engagement. The Landing makes that possible but it's a bit at odds with the system in which it resides. On the bright side, at least a year or two ago, and although they were the largest identifiable subset of people on the site, course members accounted for a fairly small minority of those on the site overall.

For reference, these are Jane Jacobs's principles from The Death and Life of Great American Cities that we (well, I) try to follow, paraphrased...

• Density of population (there must be many eyes)
• Diverse primary uses
• Mix of old and new (interpreted here as carefully-designed-for-purpose vs evolved-or-throwaway)
• Short blocks (interpreted here as high connectivity - easy passage from one place to another)

All are quite interdependent and all are necessary - three out of four won't do. Though we have made some headway with diversity, and the others are part of the software design, that density problem remains a big one, at least in part because, though we theoretically have nearly 7,500 users (more than enough), many passed through as visiting students or moved on after using the site for a single course.  Last time I looked, only about a thousand or so were actually active, though it is hard to tell how many others are still passively tracking it via notifications and it is mostly not the same thousand at any one time - there's a lot of dipping in and out.

So - do encourage your cohorts and connections to join in! In a perfect world, the Landing would grow organically through connections but one of our problems at AU is that there are likely at least 30,000 students passing through every year that don't even know this space exists and, because there is no space like the Landing to learn that (I don't count Facebook groups etc as being like the Landing) it is hard to discover it. My next plan is to embed it more deeply and invisibly into other systems, but that's expensive, difficult, and it demands a level of organizational buy-in we don't yet have. This is especially tricky as the general IT thrust for the past couple of years has been to move to generic commercial platforms that demand little management but that cannot integrate well or at all with anything else - we are currently moving towards the opposite of a NGDLE.

Yes, there's definitely scope for a middle ground. For instance, it would not be unreasonable to firmly encourage program students to fill in profiles as part of the enrolment process, and perhaps to join a group or two (e.g. the CDE group). I don't think that's a bad kind of coercion. It's not unlike issuing library cards - they don't have to use it, but it's good to have the option. The problems only come when there are prescribed activities though, as I say, it has not stopped me from going down that path myself because it is a mighty useful learning platform at a course level. It just has to be part of a balanced and diversity-inducing strategy. 

Moodle is and has always been firmly on the list of sites to integrate with. We've got a request in to help build in LTI support, and the beginnings of a plugin on this end to help with that, but it has taken more than 5 years to get this far and progress is slow. Also on my list of strategies is to try to encourage site owners to add 'bookmark on the Landing' links on their pages - still a bit of a challenge to make that a two-way process, so comments etc, or at least counts of bookmarks, can be displayed on the originating pages, but I think it is do-able.

I'm really looking forward to your study!

Jon