Blackboard Tutorial: Using the Discussion Board

Discussion Boards

Blackboard is much more than just a place to place your notes and course material. It can also be used to encourage deep learning through participation in online discussions One way of engaging students in a situation when Blackboard is used in addition to face-to-face teaching, for example, is to set up a Discussion Board forum to do tasks in preparation for tutorials.

Note: if you have more than one tutorial group in your course, you will need to set up online groups and add a discussion board for this group to use, if you want to keep student discussions within their tutorial groups (see the tutorial on Adding Groups).

Discussion Boards

To create a forum

You can use one of the default forums provided when your course is initially set up or you can make your own.

Control Panel > Discussion Board

Click on the Modify or Remove button alongside those that exist if you wish to alter the name or remove them entirely.

Use the Add Forum button to add a new discussion forum. Give this forum a name and description. It is good practice to include the purpose of the forum, clarify the level of your own participation and indicate whether students’ postings to this forum are assessed.

When adding or modifying a forum you need to specify forum setting for each forum. Turning off ‘Allow anonymous posts’ might be useful, especially for undergraduate courses. Allowing new threads, on the other hand, is a useful option to have on, as it gives students control over the developments of their discussions.

Adding new threads

If you have the option ‘Allow new threads’ enabled in the forum settings, then students can start a discussion on their own. On the other hand, you may want to kick it off by introducing the main topic for discussion or posting a question. Click on the forum name to enter it, and then click on the Add New Thread button to type your message. Press Submit to send.

Managing the Discussion Board

Click on Show Options on the right to display all the tools you can use to manage the discussion board.

First you need to select messages that you want to manage by ticking the corresponding boxes on the right.

You can lock threads to stop more messages being added to them (and unlock if need be).

Use the Remove button to delete any that messages. (This will permanently remove the selected messages).

Use the collect button to select messages to read all selected in one window rather than having to open each individually.

You can even archive the old threads off the main view of the discussion forum to make it easier to use for students.