Welcome to Blackboard Training: Discussion Boards Part 1, brought to you by the Center for Innovation at Indiana Wesleyan University. This training will help you to successfully utilize the Blackboard discussion tool in your own course by familiarizing you with the creation of the discussion board tool. Written instructions for this training are available at the bottom of your screen. Discussion Boards are a communication tool that allows faculty and students to post and respond in an asynchronous forum. In addition, users have the ability to upload files directly into a discussion forum. The discussion forums provide all users with the ability to interact. In the Blackboard discussion forum you have the ability to engage in the type of dynamic interaction that is a highlight of the college classroom. The Discussion Board button on the left side of your screen provides access to all opens Forums used in the course. Links to specific forums may appear in various areas, but the Discussion Board tool centralizes all the forums used within the course. If the course includes small groups, they may also have a private Discussion Board with forums available only to those users who are a part of the group. When you open the Discussion Board tool, you will see all the course forums. Unavailable Forums can only be viewed by Faculty, Administrators, and other user roles with similar permissions. The unavailable status of a Forum appears on the Discussion Board page, beneath the name of the Forum. As a faculty member, you can make a forum available or unavailable as necessary. The default is that forums are available. You can also re-arrange the order of discussion forums by left-clicking and the dragging and dropping the forum as desired. When navigating the Discussion Board, use the internal navigation such as the breadcrumbs, course menu, and other page links to return to a previous page. The Discussion Board screen gives you the option of creating a forum. To do this, click the create forum button. This takes you to the create forum window which includes three sections: Forum information, Forum availability, and Forum settings. In the forum information section enter a forum name. Be sure that the name of the forum exactly matches any names or instructions provided to students in assignments. After titling the forum, enter a forum description in the provided window. This description may be as simple as directing students to the assignment associated with this discussion. It may provide them guidelines for successfully completing the assigned discussion. The text editor status is indicated by the small button in the upper right-hand side of the text window. If the text editor is on you will see you have a number of additional options available. This provides you with many of the formatting options found in Microsoft Word. It also allows you to upload files and various media, as well as use HTML in the forum description. After entering the forum information, you are ready to determine forum availability. The default setting for this is available, but this can be changed by clicking the "No" radio button beneath the forum information window. You can also set specific date and time restrictions on forum availability, though this feature is mostly used in traditional semester based courses. Now you are ready to address forum settings. Most forum settings will remain in the default position. The first setting is "Allow Anonymous Posts," which is disabled by default, except in the Prayer forum, where students should be allowed to make requests anonymously. The second setting is "Allow Author To Delete Own Posts." Again, the default is disabled, but exceptions are made for the Prayer and Café forums. Not allowing students to delete posts encourages them to give thought and care before making their initial postings and replies. Next is the option to "Allow Author To Edit Posts." Again, the default is disabled. For grading purposes it is unwise to have students able to revise postings after they have been graded. "Allow Post Tagging." The default setting is disabled . Tags are bits of metadata added to postings that allows them to be gathered in the collection process based on a word or phrase. If Allow Post Tagging is available, instructors can create and apply text labels to collections of postings. Other discussion board users can then read, filter, and search postings using the tags, but cannot create new tags. Post tagging is not commonly used in IWU courses and use of this feature can significantly slow the loading time for the discussion board. "Allow User To Reply With Quote " is, by default, enabled. This includes the text of the original posting in the post response. "Allow File Attachments" is enabled, in order to allow students to upload files to any forum posting. These files are viewable and downloadable by everyone in the class. "Allow Members To Create Threads " is enabled, but it does depend on the course. In some courses you may wish to drive students to respond to particular postings, problems, or assignments by creating initial discussion threads in a forum and only allowing them to reply. The subscribe option lets a student receive an email notification when new postings have been made in a forum or thread. The default on this setting is disabled. You can, however, allow students to subscribe to either a specific thread or a forum. If you allow students to subscribe to a forum, you must choose if you want them to receive a link to the forum or both a link and the body of the post in their email notification. In most IWU courses we select "Include body of post in email." If “Allow members of subscribe to forum” is enabled, you and students will see a “Subscribe” button at the top of the page when you enter a discussion forum. The default setting for Allowmenbers to Rate Posts" is DISABLED. This function allows students to rate each other’s postings on a 1-5 star system. Students will then see the average of their classmates’ ratings on their posts "Force Moderation of Posts" is disabled. Using this feature means all postings will be held until a moderator reviews and releases them for class view. In addition, the moderator can delete and edit postings in all course forums, even if the force moderation option is not selected in that forum. Finally, we will look at the "Grade" option. The default setting is disabled. This setting depends on the purpose of the discussion forum. Note that if the "Grade Forum" option is selected and points are entered, a column is automatically created in the course grade center. The "Grade Threads" option works exactly the same as the grade forum, but creates a column in the grade center for each designated thread After setting up the discussion forum be sure to select "Submit." For addition information on Discussion Boards, continue on to Part 2 of this tutorial. Now that you can understand the use of Discussion boards, and can successfully create your own, the focus will be on using this tool effectively for your course.