Online Discussions > Creating and Participating in Forums

To manage a forum you must have instructor access to the forum itself. All the instructors and TAs of course site will have the ability to manage forums. In addition, at the time of forum creation, or by modifying the forum settings you can give any user of the course site administrative rights by highlighting their name and clicking the button labled "Admin". The screen will refresh and an "A" will appear next to their name.

This means that the user will have access to the Administrative Control Panel. This control panel can be accessed by logging in to the specific forum in question and then clicking on the button labeled "Show Options" or the little red triangle.

Clicking on these buttons will open up the Discussion Forum management toolbar. This toolbar allows you to perform a variety of functions on individual forums.

To select all of the messages in a forum click on the "select all" button. To unselect all of the messages click on the "unselect" button. The "Invert" button allows you to invert the checkmarks you just made. The "Read" and "Unread" buttons allows you to mark individual messages as either "read" or "unread" by selecting an individual message by placing a checkmark in the box next to it, and then clicking the button. The "Collect" button allows you to view a series of selected messages in sequence, as opposed to having to click on each message individually to read them.

If you wish to prevent users from responding to a topic or thread select the main thread in the forum and then click the button labeled "Lock". This will prevent people from replying to that message, as well as all subsequent replies. Highlighting the main thread again and then clicking "Unlock" will allow people to reply to that thread once again.

The "Remove" button will delete a message from a forum entirely. **PLEASE NOTE** When a user with administrative access removes a message from a forum it will disappear from EVERYONES view of the forum. This is a public discussion board - any message that gets "removed" from the forum is gone for good.

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Related FAQ's

Q: How can I encourage student participation?

1 - Allow participation in threaded discussions to be used as a portion of a student's participation grade (in-class participation and on-line participation being weighted somewhat equally).

2 - Post an interactive assignment in a discussion forum and provide guidelines as to what you would like to see in the postings; encourage students to read/respond to each other's posts.

3 - Early in the semester participate actively by picking out a few good posts and respond to them yourself to let students know that you are actively reading messages in these forums.

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