Student Quick Start

In your courses, instructors use discussion forums to help students share ideas and discuss topics, even when they’re not online at the same time. Each course will have several forums, each with its own topic or purpose. You can also set your preferences for how you want to receive notifications from these 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.

• Proofread your posts. A quick read through what you've written before posting them will help you avoid spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. 
• Avoid “text speak,” internet language, or non-standard abbreviations. It may be difficult for your fellow participants to understand you and most instructors expect academic-style language in both the forums and the assignments.
• Be mindful of your tone and word choice. Humor and tone are difficult to convey in a written message and may come across as rude or brusque if your words are not chosen carefully.
• Avoid typing in all capital letters or italics. All capital letters is seen as shouting (and therefore often offensive) and long strings of italics are difficult to read. Using capitals, italics, or bold for brief emphasis is fine.
• Respect others’ privacy and confidentiality. Your classmates may share details or struggles about their professional lives as they're relevant to the course material. Don't share that information, or anyone's personal contact information, without their explicit permission.

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:

• Why do I keep getting an error message when I run this code?
• What does everyone think about this current event related to what we're learning in this class?

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. 

You can customize the forum settings to fit your preferences. While you can change settings for each forum individually, you also have the option to apply your preferences to almost all forums across the entire site at once. However, the Course News and Announcements forum in each course is used by your instructor to share important information and isn’t affected by these settings.

Accessing Forum Preferences

1. To view your profile, select the drop down next to your name on the upper right hand corner of any page, then select preferences. 

2. Select Forum Preferences under User Account. 

Adjusting Forum Preferences

You can adjust any of the settings on this page, then click the Save changes button when you're finished.

• Email digest type: You may choose to receive all emails from LATTE in one daily message. There is also the option to receive either the complete message or just the Subjects from forums you subscribe to.
• Forum auto-subscribe: If you select yes for this, it will mean that when you post a message to a forum, you will be subscribed to that forum and receive email copies of all messages for that forum. You may unsubscribe from forums if you wish as well.
• Forum Tracking: This is a useful option to enable. If it is enabled in your LATTE courses, it will highlight unread forum messages so you can easily see what is new.
• When sending forum post notifications: When you are notified of a forum post, you can choose whether this should mark the post as read for the purpose of forum tracking.

You can start new discussions and reply to your instructors and/or classmates in most Moodle forums. 

Posting

1. Navigate to the forum you want to post to, then select its name or icon. 

2.  The forum prompt will display at the top.  Click the Add discussion topic button to write and post your reply. 

3. Some forums are set up where there isn't a button to add your post.  For those forums, click Reply under the prompt to enter your post. 

4.  After you complete your post, click Post to forum. 

Replying

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 Post to forum. 

Advanced Settings

Selecting the link Advanced will provide access to the ability to upload a file to a discussion forum. 

Selecting the drop down arrow in the upper left hand corner of the discussion tool bar will expand the tool bar and reveal more options.