Discussions Setup - Questions and Messages

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Many online courses use discussion forums to engage students in class participation. Depending on your professor, a Discussion forum may be accessed from Course Menu or a course Learning Module. In this course, there is a "Discussions" link on the Course Menu.

1. Click on the Discussions link on the Course Menu. You will see a list of discussion forums. By default, up to 25 forums are listed on one page. When there are more than 25 forums, click on the right arrow at the bottom of the page to go to the next page.

2. For a forum, you see a total number of messages, a number of unread messages, and a number of participants. Your professor may post discussion questions in the description area of a Discussion Forum. At this page, you see the discussion questions in each of the forums.

3. When you click on a Forum Title, you will enter the form and see a list of message threads with the Subject, Author, and Date. The most recent thread is placed at the bottom. In List View, you also see the number of unread messages and total number of messages. In Tree View, only the subject, author, and date of the messages are shown. A "+" sign indicates that there are more than one message in a thread.

4. In either List View or Tree View, click on the Subject of a thread. You will see the initial message and the replied messages with Subject, date, and author. To read all the replied messages, click on the -> to see the next message or click on the <-- to see the previous message. After you have reviewed all messages, go to the Navigation Path -clicking on the Forum Title to go back to the Forum page.

5. By default, up to 25 message threads are listed on one page. When there are more than 25 message threads, you will use --> next page icon to go to next page for more messages.

*A thread is a series of messages on a subject.

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