Oncourse CL Forums: Overview

What it does

Forums is a communication tool that instructors or site leaders can use to create an unlimited number of discussion forums for their course or project sites. The Forums tool is designed to be an effective tool for both academic and collaborative work, and is integrated closely with other tools such as Resources and Gradebook.

Key concepts

Discussion forums: Asynchronous discussion provides an opportunity for your site participants to engage site resources and each other, and allows for the free expression of convergent and divergent ideas. Interactions can be assigned a point value and sent to the Gradebook with comments.

Viewing forums: On your site's Home page (select Home on the site's menubar), participants can see how many unread discussion forum messages they have. On the Forums screen, participants see the number of unread messages and the grand total of messages for each topic. In the forums list, forums and topics are viewed as a thread by default.

Composing messages: A WYSIWYG interface allows rich text, plain text, and HTML editing. You can add attachments to any message by linking to files or web links in Resources.

Note: Pasting text from Microsoft Word directly into the WYSIWYG editor may result in garbled output, even if the text appears correct in the editor. Instead, to insert formatted text from a Word document, click the Paste from Word icon, place your cursor in the subsequent "Paste from Word" text box, and then press Ctrl-v in Windows, or Cmd-v on a Macintosh, to paste your copied text. Using Ctrl-v (or Cmd-v) to paste is the best method for preserving the formatting of the original Word document. Click OK to add the text to the item you are composing.

Quoted text: Use the Insert Original Text option to insert the previous post into your response.

Statistics: Forum statistics are available for site owners to determine the participation level of individual participants.

Print-friendly view: A print-friendly view is available.

Import forums and topics: Re-use materials easily by importing forums and topics from your other sites.

Settings: The site owner (or another participant with the appropriate role) can enable participants to submit their posts to a topic before they have permission to read the responses of others.

Group awareness: Site leaders can change forum and topic settings in combination with pre-defined groups to allow or deny access to specific discussions per group.

Things to consider

• A forum is not visible to site participants unless at least one topic is created.

Help documentation

For help documentation about the Forums tool, see Oncourse CL Forums: Help contents.