The Discussion Forum in CoursePlus lets you and students discuss issues, pose questions, provide feedback, and even work on group assignments in small or large groups. The Discussion Forum area is a tool for asynchronous interaction, meaning you send and receive messages according to your own schedule — much like email. Unlike email, however, all communication in the Discussion Forum is public — messages posted to a forum can be viewed by others in your course, and others can respond to your messages in a very public way. While there are "private" areas for discussion in the Discussion Forum, most communication is public.
The Discussion Forum is located under the Communication menu of each course website.
Discussion Forum features
- Posts: Posts are the basic units of communication in the Discussion Forums. You create a posts by typing the information you wish to share and then "posting" the message.
- Categories: The individual posts in each course Discussion Forum are organized in general directories — or categories — based upon a general topic. For example, you may have a course with categories labeled "Exercise 1," "Exam Study," and "Module 1." To help keep the Discussion Forums organized as clearly as possible, you should make posts pertaining to different topics in the appropriate categories.
- Topics: Subtopic — or "threads" — of discussion further categorize posts in each category. For example, in an "Exercise 1" category, a discussion of how the exercise will be graded might constitute one topic; another topic in the same category might pertain to ideas for completing the exercise. There are usually multiple topics in each category.
- Bookmarks: You can bookmark specific posts for review at a later time.
- Email notifications: You can elect to receive notification by email of any new messages posted to a specific topic or an entire category.
- File attachments: Messages can include attachments such as graphics, Microsoft Word files, and PowerPoint files.
- Emoji reactions: Similar to Facebook's Like button, you can quickly react to an existing post by selecting one of nine available emoji.
- Searching: You can search across the entire course Discussion Forums for messages containing a specific word or phrase.