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UIC Board Manager's Guide: WebBoard Version 3.5 This document is also available in print-ready format.
3. Adding A Conference As board manager, you are authorized to add conferences and choose specific settings for each conference, such as access rights per user, enabling chat, or allowing file attachments in postings. All of these settings can be changed at a later time by using the option for Managing Conferences from the Manager Menu. Add Conference is the first option under the Manager Menu. It brings up a form with several options. We walk you through all of them, providing suggestions how they should preferably be filled in.
First, you have to select a name for the conference. This name will appear in the list of conferences (left frame), as well as at the top of each message posted in it. Thus it should be short (it should fit in the box provided). While this name may possibly contain HTML tags, you should not put links in it, as those will not be noticeable for the user (all of the conference name is a link anyway). You should also provide a brief description of the conference, which is shown in the conference profile (under MORE… ) to give the user a better idea what the conference is about. Here you can use HTML tags without problems.
The next section allows you to set up a mailing list for this conference. Users would then be able to individually subscribe to this mailing list and receive the conference's postings as regular email without having to connect to WebBoard. The email messages contain links and headers allowing the users to reply to the conference or to the message's author with their email program. This feature is useful mostly if one of your students has problems with their webbrowser or is on a trip where web-access is not readily available. Email can be done from a simple terminal session, or can be downloaded quickly and thus save connection costs.
While you will probably never need this, you can choose to have the conference moderated, i.e. each posting would need to be read and accepted by you or another moderator before becoming available to the rest of the class. To facilitate this task, you can give any other user of your board moderator access to this conference. Select users from the scrolling menu (to select several users, hold down Control ) listing all users with access to your board. Note also that board managers have moderator rights to all conferences. Note also that a conference's moderators have full access to this conference. They can edit its profile, archive/retrieve messages, add users to it etc. just like you. If you wish to have someone helping you with all your managing tasks without granting him the full board manager's access, you could make him moderator of all of your conferences. You don't even need the WebBoard administrator for that!
Message archiving allows you to keep your conference to a manageable size by keeping the number of messages displayed low. Messages beyond the limit you set here will be archived. That improves browser response time for your students considerably. You can specify an age limit as well as a maximum number of messages to keep in the active database. If you leave these values set to 0, no archiving will take place (not recommended). Note that this feature has a problem with messages containing attachments - they will not be available anymore if you later retrieve archived messages.
The Settings section allows you to adapt the conference to fit your needs and its purpose. Your options are:
Active Links and Images should remain checked. Then users can post URLs in their messages and classmates can simply click on the link to follow it. It is a good early homework to make students browse the web for something class-related and post their findings to WebBoard. This feature is also extremely useful in group-work.
Chat Settings allow you to enable real-time chat for this conference. As real-time chat is rather overwhelming with many simultaneous users, you probably want to limit this feature mostly to small-group conferences. However, a scheduled chat time for the whole class can be very beneficial in replacing the classroom discussion. This can serve as part of your office hours too—although the ability to post/email questions at any time is one of the most important benefits of online learning, sometimes the quick interaction of chat is preferable over the lengthy exchange via email. Again, active links and images should remain enabled. The option to log chat dialogue to disk can be used to keep track of students' participation for grading purposes. Use this feature with care, as log files soon grow huge! Note that you can not choose here the chat program used. All of your board uses either WebBoard's internal JavaScript-based chat program or the more powerful Java-based ConferenceRoom IRC chat from WebMaster Inc. This setting has to be made by the WebBoard administrator. Currently (July 98), the ConferenceRoom chat program is not enabled for any board due to security problems. A fix will soon be installed and boards then will be able use this program upon request to webboard@uic.edu.
The settings for File Attachments usually should be left unchanged. Students should be able to attach homework, images, etc. to their postings. We do not currently impose any limits on number or size of these attachments. Once you have finished filling out the details, click on the CREATE button. This will display a window confirming the details entered and informing you that the conference has been created.
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