Note: See our Discussion Board Video Tour for a quick overview.
For your course work, instructors will expect you to share ideas and experiences with the class. Forum Discussions are intended as highly interactive activities leading to lively, engaging discussion, and if successful, a diverse range of solutions to hypothetical situations or questions.
As an educational professional you should qualify all of your views or opinions with thoughtful, referenced deliberation; don't simply express a stance ("I like it" or "I agree"). Your instructor will assign a participation grade based on your overall impact on the discussions. In other words, quality is more important than quantity.
To access a specific discussion (often referred to as a forum), you will click the button labeled Discussion Board and select the topic corresponding to the particular module you are in. Depending on how your instructor names each individual forum, you can identify the appropriate discussion by either the name or the number of the module, as illustrated below:
Figure 11: Forum Discussion Menu
Once you click the link corresponding to the forum topic, you will then view a web page from where you can select discussions by your classmates, instructor, or group (if assigned), or post new comments yourself. The initial discussion board listing shows the total number of posts, unread posts, and number of participants. Click the link displaying the number of Unread posts to quickly collect and view new postings.
Note: The discussion board has many options, so don't worry about learning how or why to use all of the features. Most people only need the basics, and you'll eventually learn tricks and shortcuts as you progress in the program.
Each time someone starts a new round of discussion (e.g. new topic related to the week's assignment or perhaps a side topic), they begin a Thread, which contains a posting and all of its responses. The initial discussion window will look similar to the screen in Figure 12 below. For privacy reasons last names of students in the following screen shots are hidden.
Figure 12: Forum (List View)
Note that the Discussion board provides two views. List View displays individual posts, sorted by date, author or subject and Tree View displays threads (collapsed by default). Click on the little triangle corresponding to the postings category (e.g. date, thread, author, etc.) to sort the postings (in List View only).
For example, if you wish to quickly browse for a contribution from a particular date you could sort by date to identify all postings for that date. You can also search by keyword. Figure 13 below shows a Tree View display.
Figure 13: Forum (Tree View)
One useful option is the ability to Collect selected messages. This allows you to pick and chose which messages to display, either for printing or for organizing just those posts to which you intend to respond. See the screen shot below.
Figure 14: Collect Postings in Discussion Board
The fastest way to find a specific post is to use the Search feature in the Discussion Board. Simply enter a keyword or the name of a person whose postings you are searching, and click Go (see below).
Figure 15: Searching the Discussion Board
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