Discussions offer you a way to communicate and work with your classmates in online courses. The Discussions are actually the best place for you to work together, to share information and documents, and to participate in discussions.
Unlike "chat rooms", Discussions let you participate without having to be online at the same time. While brief chat sessions can be an effective way to quickly assign responsibilities at the beginning of a project, or brainstorm a quick solution to a dilemma that is holding up group process, Discussions offers the best venue for actually carrying out the work.
The "thread" feature in computer conferencing helps you follow multiple ongoing discussions, and gives you a permanent record of your work together. Attachments let you share files with your group members, helping you to monitor the progress of your group work. While you can attach files to email messages, the private nature of email can make it more difficult to organize group work. Computer conferences keep your discussions and attachments conveniently organized in one place.
Discussions also allow your instructor to participate in discussions, monitor your groupwork, and offer feedback. Your instructor cannot do this if you are privately emailing each other. Save email messages for intentionally private communication.
Discussion rooms are split into the different topics to help keep the questions you have related to each topic. By clicking on the + sign you can go into even more sections within each topic. Clicking on the - sign will close the subtopic list. Clicking on one of subtopics will take you into the discussion room about that subject.
Allows you to add a new message to the Discussions area. Topic - where you would write an outline of the subject of conversation. Message - some text that you want transmitted.
Allows you to attach a file with your message. Submit - puts your comment/question/answer or anything you want to discuss into the Discussions room.
There is a scroll bar at the top of the page that lets you decide how you want messages to appear.
Expand All Threads: This lets you see all messages sorted by threads (conversations).
Show All Messages: This lists all messages regardless of threads.
Sorted By Title: This groups messages by title of message.
Sorted by Author: This groups messages by author.
Sorted by Unread: This groups all unread messages.
View Flagged: - Shows all flagged messages.
To begin a search, click on the Show Search button on the top of the page. You may put a word or string of words in the search box at the top of the page and click on Search to find messages in that Discussions room that have that word or string of words. This is a Normal Search.
Clicking on Advanced Search allows you to do a search on a word or string of words in a conference. It also lets you choose if you wish to search just the subject lines or both subject lines and bodies of messages, and it lets you set date parameters for your search.
This allows you to indicate messages of importance. Click on the message title and then choose the Flag button in the lower half of the screen. A red flag appears when the screen is refreshed.
To remove a flag from a single message, click on Remove Flag after selecting the message. To remove all flags within the conference topic, click on the Remove All Flags button on the top of the page.
Printing messages is a great way of keeping a permanent record of the discussions. View the messages you would like printed by searching, flagging, sorting, etc. If you would like to print the messages viewed on your screen, click on the View Printable button on the top of the page.
