Adding Discussion Board Forums

Overview
Discussion Boards are a great way to work asynchronously with your students. In order to get one started, you first need to add a Discussion Forum that your students can post to. Discussion forums can be used for a wide range of things, from virtual office hours to weekly assignments.

Add a discussion board forum using the Blackboard Control Panel:

1. Go to the course in which you wish to add the forum.
2. Select the Control Panel in the course menu on the left.
3. Under Course Tools select Discussion Board.
4. Select the link to the Discussion Board.
5. Select the +Forum button at the top of the page.
6. Provide a name for the forum.
7. If you want your students to be able to access the forum, make sure Available is set to Yes.
8. If you wish to allow anonymous posting, select the box next to Allow Anonymous Posts. Please note that there is no way to tell who made a specific post if you allow this and the poster chooses to be anonymous.
9. If you wish to allow users to remove their own posts, select the box next to Allow Author to Remove Own Posts. You must then select whether to allow them to remove any posts they make, or just those to which no one else has replied. We recommend the latter.
10. If you wish to allow users to change their posts after publishing them, select the box next to Allow author to modify own published posts. Keep in mind that this can make conversation in a thread out of context, if a user modifies their post after others have replied.
11. Allowing users to reply with quote can be a handy way to provide context in a long discussion thread. However, lengthy quotes can take up significant space. If you want users to be able to include quotes in their replies to posts, select the box next to Allow users to reply with quote.
12. If you wish to allow users to attach files to their posts, select the box next to Allow file attachments. We strongly recommend that you only allow this if you are not also allowing anonymous posts.
13. Depending on the purpose of a discussion forum, you may or may not want your students to create new threads within the forum. If you want all students to respond to a thread you originally set up, then do not check the box next to Allow members to create new threads. If, however, you would like them to start up new threads for discussion, make sure this box is checked.
14. Some users like to be able to subscribe to forums so that they recieve emails when a new post is made. You can decide whether you want subcriptions or not under the Subscribe option.
15. Blackboard discussion boards have the option to allow users to rate each others posts. If you want this feature, select the box next to Allow members to rate posts.
16. If you want to grade posts in a discussion forum before the rest of the class can see the posts, click the box next to Force moderation of posts. This will place all posts in a moderation queue that only moderators can see. Please note that you have to clear the posts from this queue before the students can see them, simply turning off moderation will not show all posts still in the queue.
17. If you want to grade the forum or threads, you can select these options under Grade. This will tie the discussion forum to your Grade Center.
18. Select Submit.
19. Select Ok.

Questions? E-mail help@campus.fsu.edu or call (850) 644-8004.