Introduction | Post and Reply | Mark as Read | Attachments | Private Messages | My Profile | Extra Features
The JForum Discussions & Private Messages tool is a place for asynchronous discussion amongst the class participants. Often an instructor will require your participation in class discussions. Other instructors may suggest that you use this area for you to get to know other people in your class, to collaborate, ask questions, etc. but without making it a course requirement.
Asynchronous discussions means that they do not take place in "real" time. You may log on and start a discussion or add to an existing topic at any time. Another student may log in a few hours or days later and reply to your topic and start their own. You may find this environment quite similar to other discussion boards you've used elsewhere on the Internet.
The Private Message portion of this tool allows you to send messages privately to one or more of your fellow classmates. You can send the instructor a private message if you don't want anyone else to see the message. And the instructor can send you a private message back. The limit to sending private messages is a message can be sent to 10 others at one time.
The picture above shows the first screen, or Home Page, of the discussion tool.
Discussions are generally broken into categories and forums. Instructors organize their sites differently from other instructors, so they may not all look alike. There may be many or few forums. To read the postings within a particular forum, you click on the title of that forum. For example, you would click on Fun stuff in the list above to read postings that are about fun stuff, not class discussions.
The links at the top of this page are also at the top of all your discussion pages. The links make it easy to go elsewhere in Discussions and then get back to this home page. You can return to home from any page of the tool by click on "Discussion Home" or "Discussion List."
You can access your profile area and private messages using the links at the top of the window. These features will be discussed in following sections.
At the very bottom of the discussions home page is a legend telling you of what each icon label means. To tell the truth, I rarely see that legend . . . it's down just a little too far on the page to be useful. Feel free to investigate it on your own.
Content originally developed by the
ETUDES Consortium Project.
This version is licensed under
Creative Commons, Sarah Phinney, 2007.
12/21/06