Oncourse Forums: Overview
What it does
The Forums tool allows instructors or site leaders to create an unlimited number of discussion forums, and is integrated closely with other tools such as Resources and Gradebook.
Key concepts
Grading option: Interactions can be assigned a point value and sent to the Gradebook with comments.
Counts of unread posts at a glance: On your site's
Home page (select Home on the site's menubar), you
can see how many unread messages or posts you have in both Messages
and Forums. From My Workspace, you can see these totals
for all sites you're a member of.
Ability to watch forums: Site members can elect to receive no email notification, notification for all new postings in a site, or notification for responses to threads they've posted in.
Composing messages: A WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface allows rich text, plain text, and HTML editing. You can add attachments to any message by linking to files or web links in Resources.
Note: Pasting text from Microsoft Word directly into
the WYSIWYG editor may result in garbled output, even if
the text appears correct in the editor. Instead, to insert formatted
text from a Word document, click the Paste from Word icon,
and paste using Ctrl-v or Command-v.
For details, see Pasting from Microsoft Word.
Some users have reported problems using Paste from Word in
Internet Explorer 9; for best results, use a supported
browser. See
Which browser should I use?
Quoted text: Use the Insert Original Text
option to insert the previous post into your response.
Statistics: Forum statistics are available for site owners to determine the participation level of individual participants. You can also read all of a particular participant's posts using this feature.
Settings: The site owner (or another participant with the appropriate role) can enable participants to submit their posts to a topic before they have permission to read the responses of others.
Group awareness: Site leaders can change forum and topic settings in combination with predefined groups to allow or deny access to specific discussions per group.
Direct link to individual messages: Site leaders can copy a direct link to individual messages to use elsewhere.
Email the author of a message: Site leaders can directly email the author of a posting from within the forum tool.
Help documentation
For help documentation about the Forums tool, see Forums.
Last modified on July 22, 2011.
