Discussion Board
The Discussion Board provides a way to manage multiple, long and/or complex conversations. A Discussion Board is generally made up of forums, which may pertain to a particular group or course theme. Within each forum, users can create threads which further organize posts and responses.
Setting up a forum
In your Blackboard course:
Go to Communication > Discussion Board
Click Forum
Add a name and description and set availability.
Adjust Forum Settings (explained below) then click Submit.
A few things about Forum Settings:
- Allow post tagging
- tags are keywords that can make searching or grouping discussions easier
- Allow members to rate posts
- enables a star system for rating important or useful posts
- Subscribing to a thread or forum allows students to receive email alerts when new discussions have been posted
- Grading forums or threads
- create a column in the Grade Center to give points for discussion participation (Grade Forum) or individual discussions (Grade threads)
Writing and Viewing Threads
From within a forum, click Thread. The thread is the question, prompt or content, usually posted by the instructor, that starts the discussion.
Add your Subject and Message. In Blackboard 8, messages can include rich media (images, video, and file attachments) as well as text. If you intend to grade the thread, you can select that option here as well.
After clicking Submit, the forum view will appear.
Clicking on the thread link will open the thread detail, revealing the body of the message.
Replying To a Message and Quoting Other Posts
Click Reply to simply reply to a post. Click Quote to include the content of the original post in the reply.
Once you've made a selection, you can also see the original post by clicking Show Parent Post.
