I’m excited to announce that every course in our library now includes a new Discussion tab where you can discuss the course. After a lot of debate, we’ve settled on LiveFyre as our discussion provider, which gives you lots of options for signing in and sharing the discussion: you can use a Twitter account, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, or OpenId, or a combination so that you can easily share your discussion across multiple social networks.

To get started, simply visit the Discussion tab for any course and click Sign In.

You can sign in with any one of the listed social networks, or create a password directly with LiveFyre. As you write your post, you can use the pencil and @ buttons on the bottom left to add markup and references to friends on your social networks. Before you click “Post comment” on the right, be sure to select the social networks where you’d like to share your post. In the example here I’ve selected LinkedIn and Facebook.

We’re hoping you’ll use this as a way to connect with other students of our courses, discussing the course, the technology that the course covers, or the materials of the course itself. We’ve already had one student leave a comment about a missing file in a new course and the author herself jumped right in and provided a link to her SkyDrive to quickly resolve the problem while we updated the Exercise Files for the course. While we can’t guarantee involvement from any particular author (many of them are industry luminaries and have busy schedules), we think you’ll find that most of our authors love to connect with students.

We’d also love to hear your feedback about the course – if like something about it, use LiveFyre to tell us and share it with your friends! If you find something you don’t like, tell us that too – we’re always working to raise our game, and our authors love detailed feedback.

As with any social feature, it’s tough to know how it’ll be used before it goes live, so we’re excited to see how our customer community will make use of this new feature. Give it a try today!