Upgrade to Blackboard 7 - Discussion Board redesign
The discussion board has been significantly redesigned in Blackboard 7. This change affects both instructors and students. Here is an overview of the most important changes and features:
When accessing the course discussion board, you will see a list of the forae in the discussion board. Discussion can only take place when at least one forum has been created by the instructor (with the Add Forum towards the top of the page). In Blackboard 7, information about each forum is provided:
- Number of total posts
- Number of unread posts
- Number of forum participants
Also note the new search functionality, which allows you to search for any term, optionally limited by date. The search function only searches the posts and subject lines, not the name of the submitter. Therfore, search cannot be used to filter the discussion board by user. Instructors can use the Performance Dashboard to look at Discussion Board submissions on a per-user basis.
To read or participate in one of the forae, first click on the blue underlined title of a forum. This will take you into the forum, where a list of all the threads, or original messages, in the forum are displayed. For each thread, you also see:
- Creation date of each thread
- Name of the user who initiated the thread
- Number of total posts in the thread
- Number of unread posts
The list of threads can be sorted by any of these criteria by clicking on the small white triangles above the column titles. For examle, you can sort the threads by "Total Posts" in order to pull to the top threads with the most activity.
To create a new thread (this needs to be enabled for students when the forum is created by the instructor), click on the the Add Thread button towards the top of the page.
To read any one of the threads, click on the blue underlined name of the thread. This will bring up a listing of the original thread and any replies to the original post.
To read any one post, click on the blue underlined title of the post.
To reply to any post, click on the "Reply" button in the text window for that particular post.
To read all posts on a single page, locate the drop-down menu below the listing of posts. Choose "Select All" and click the Go button. This places a checkmark next to all of the posts. Next, click the Collect button towards the top of the screen. This will collect all selected posts on one page. Note that you can sort the posts by author, date, subject, or thread.
A separate document for instructors describes forum settings in Blackboard 7: Discussion Board forum options.