Beginning with the Fall 2024 semester, Brandeis will move from LATTE to Moodle 4. Please visit our Moodle 4 documentation. LATTE courses will be available through Fall 2024.
Instructors use discussion forums in your courses to facilitate asynchronous discussion amongst students. Your course will include multiple discussion forums, each with a specific purpose and topic. You can adjust your personal preferences for how you receive notifications from forums.
Most of your courses will include regular participation in discussion forums with your classmates and instructors. Brandeis courses are both academic and professional environments and you should tailor your communication accordingly.
"Netiquette" is a general set of guidelines to follow in your courses when interacting with your instructor and fellow students. These are not firm rules but rather a set of best practices to ensure that others understand what you've written and that everyone is respected. In synchronous or face-to-face communications we can use body language to supplement our words and we can clarify or rephrase our messages in real time. However, in this online written environment we have to put more thought and planning into our words before sharing them since we don't have the benefit of spontaneous modifications. Below are some general tips and guidelines to keep in mind when you're posting in your courses.
You can adjust the forum settings to your own preferences. You could adjust each forum individually, but you can also set your preferences for almost all forums sitewide at once. The Course News and Announcements forum in each course is used to push important information to you from your instructor and is not affected by the preferences below.
You can adjust any of the settings on this page, then click the Save changes button when you're finished.
All Brandeis courses include multiple forums with different purposes. Scroll through the other tabs within this box to read about the different forum types. Each tab includes a note at the top about the location of each forum within your Brandeis course shell.
Ask the Class
Your classmates can be your best resource when you're having trouble with coursework. Often, you'll have a question that others in the class either know the answer to, or others would benefit from seeing the answer to your question (because they have the same question, too!).
Use the Ask the Class forum to pose questions to your classmates and browse past questions. Your instructor will periodically check this forum to answer any questions that are not addressed by students. Some common topics you may find in this forum include:
If you find any broken links or have questions regarding your own work, please contact the instructor directly.
Weekly Discussions
In some of your courses, you will have a weekly discussion forum where your instructor will post one or more prompts for you to reply to. These prompts relate to the topic you'll be reviewing that week. Most courses require you to post two substantive replies to other students' posts in addition to your own. These are included as part of your final grade for the course. The scoring rubric and percentage of your total grade vary by instructor, check the information in your course and in your syllabus to understand what's expected of you.
Your instructor will post the grade and feedback for your discussion forum posts and replies in a separate activity called Participation Feedback.
You can start new discussions and reply to your instructor and/or classmates in most LATTE forums
You can reply to posts by your instructor or your classmates within the forums. Click Reply under the post you want to reply to, write your reply, then click Submit.
Forums are the main communication site for faculty and students in the course.