What is Discussion Forum and Threaded Discussion?

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A Discussion Forum provides students an opportunity to participate in virtual conversations at any time and any location. Threaded discussions refer to online postings on a specific topic. In an online course, you professor may have weekly discussion assignments. Each week, there are questions for students to answer. Students are asked to post their answer on a Discussion Forum. Students can read the messages and respond to them. This group of messages with the initial message and responses is called a 'thread'.

Here is an example of Threaded Discussion. In Blackboard, the List View is default view of discussion messages. In List View, you see a group of message threads. In a message thread, you see the number of posts and number of unread posts. In Tree View, you see a + sign next to a message thread. In either Tree View or List View, when you click on the Subject line of a thread
, you see the initial message and the responses with subject, author, and posting date.

A message posted on the Discussion Forum can be viewed by your professor and all students enrolled in your course. If you would like to write a private message to your professor or to a student, use the Email Author on the discussion board or directly go to the Messages tool and send a message there
. When you use Email Author, your message will be sent to the person's college email account. When you send a message to someone in Messages, your coorspondant will click on the Messages link on the Course Menu and see your message in Inbox.

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