Usage Examples

This page has a few hints and suggestions for how you might organize the Forums for your courses. Remember that CourseForum offers you the flexibility to set things up how you like, so consider these as starting points to be added to and adapted.

Lecture Notes

Add a page for each lecture, along with an index page that points to all of them. Add the PowerPoint file from your lecture as an attachment to the page. Let students add their own notes taken during class, or add followup questions and comments. Post links or attachments containing materials related to the lecture's topic.

Student Portfolios

Let students start their own pages, containing their own personal information, or notes on the course. Use these pages to share presentations, documents and research they've prepared with others in the course. Create an index page that will point to these portfolios, and let each student link their own work to this index.

Group Projects

Use the "Projects" page to create separate Forums for smaller group projects taking place in the course. Students in the group can password protect the Forum so nobody else can see what they're working on.

In the project Forum, they can store the latest drafts of reports they're preparing and post comments on these drafts. Keep a todo list so that everyone in the group knows whats left to be done and who is doing it. Brainstorm new ideas. Keep track of relevant bookmarks and other research.

Home page

The "Home" page of the Forum is important because it's normally where people will enter. It's therefore a good place to put announcements, links to important information, and links to current discussion topics you'd like people to participate in.

If it's important that people see something, the Home page is a good place to put it.

Information Pages

The Forum is a convenient place to store information pages, things like contact information, a syllabus, assignments, etc. like you'd post on any web site. Because editing such pages is easy, it makes it convenient to keep them updated.

Place links on the Home page to these informational pages. If you have a lot of them, make a single "Course Information" page linked from the Home page, which in turn has links to all the other pages.

You might want to lock down these pages (using the "Lock this page" feature on the Edit screens), but still allow students to post their comments or questions right on them.

Discussions

You can use the "Post" features to add comments or have discussions on any page in the Forum. When you want to discuss a topic in some depth, start a new page just for that topic.

Add a paragraph at the top of the page introducing the topic, and inviting students to add their own comments. Encourage them to include links in their comments to other Forums or other web pages that are relevant to the discussion.

As discussion continues, you might want to pull out side topics into their own page (use Copy and Paste to move the postings over to the new page, and leave a link in the original discussion).

Put a link to the discussion in a "Hot Topics" area of the course Home page, so people can quickly find the discussion topic. As you move on to other topics, move these links to an "Older Discussions" page.

Questions and Answers

Start a page for questions and answers. Let students post any questions they have - and get answers (and opinions!) from yourself, teaching assistants and other students.

As with discussions, think about spinning off any larger issues to their own pages, and consider moving older topics to an "Old Questions" page. And remember to link to the Q&A; page from the Home page.