Redundant Discord Link

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[waciumawanjohi]

For context:
This change was made in response to the discussion "Future of Cohorts" in the Cohorts repo (which has since been archived). The idea came from @spamegg1 who wrote at the time,

Most people who ever come across OSSU will have a lazer sharp focus on the curriculum and nothing else. I never knew Gitter, Cohorts, or even Extras existed until recently. And I had been visiting the Curriculum page regularly for almost 2 years!

Also people will not read the "prose" inside README. They will just scroll down to the list of courses. Then some of them will come to Gitter and ask questions that are already answered in the "prose".

Therefore: on the curriculum, right next to each course, we must have links directly to a current cohort taking that class and its Gitter/whatever chat room. RIGHT NEXT TO EACH COURSE is by FAR the most important thing here. Kinda like this (just a mock-up):

Courses	Duration	Effort	Prerequisites	Students currently taking this class
How to Code - Simple Data	7 weeks	8-10 hours/week	none	Chat with your cohorts

This way the cohorts/chatrooms are ANCHORED both in the curriculum and in people's minds. So the social aspects must be directly integrated into the curriculum.

It would make sense to have PERMANENT cohort/chatrooms for each class,

[waciumawanjohi]

I believe that @spamegg1 's hypothesis has been borne out. Since adding the links next to each course we have seen a remarkable jump in student participation in OSSU chatrooms. That participation is valuable, it's not clear to me what we could tell students that would be more important than, "If you want to talk to others taking this class, you can do so here."

[rachel83az]

Perhaps once for each section (Intro, Core, Math, etc.) instead of once for each listed course?

[waciumawanjohi]

This Issue has been open for a few months and has not attracted a wide base of support. While I agree that the current layout is a bit clunky, I do think that one of the valuable things that OSSU does is give like-minded CS self studiers a forum for discussion and support. I'm hesitant to make a change that makes that less visible. We should keep this feedback in mind during any future overhaul of the curriculum's UI.