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:

1. Use the forum yourself to post answers to common questions
2. Direct students there to use the forum questions that don't need to be confidential
3. Redirect student queries, where possible, to the forum