Course-Wide Discussions
Directed, graded discussions are a fine way to contribute to a learning community, and we strongly suggested using them.
But course-wide discussion forums are also useful for creating a sense of community and have the double benefit of potentially saving your effort when responding to common or repeated questions.
The template we shared has a course-wide FAQ Discussion Board for just this purpose. Its use is straight-forward:
- Use the forum yourself to post answers to common questions
- Direct students there to use the forum questions that don't need to be confidential
- Redirect student queries, where possible, to the forum