Blackboard, a Course Management System available to Spokane Falls Community College faculty and students, provides a powerful and easy to use Discussion Board. The Blackboard Discussion Board consists of forums, threads, and posts. Forums let the instructor organize discourse around questions, cases, and projects. Threads provide a means of structuring conversations within a forum. A discussion thread consists of a series of Posts (messages) indented in a hierarchical "tree-like" fashion, as shown in the figure below. Notice that each post displays a subject heading, author, and date. The posts beneath a thread are arranged in chronological order, based on the date the message was posted.

The level of indentation in a discussion thread plays a key role in identifying the various conversational "branches" within the thread. The levels of indentation provide an intuitive way of tracing individual conversations, from beginning to end. The outermost level marks the beginning of a thread branch, while the innermost message indicates the end of the branch. For example, the reply from John Eastwood to Mary Smith marks the end of one branch in the discussion thread initiated by Don Barker.

To read this conversational branch in sequence, you would first click the subject heading of the outermost post (i.e., Brief Intro and online course plans) and then click each succeeding subject heading below it. Clicking the minus sign (-) in front of thread or thread branch collapses the postings beneath it, hiding them. Clicking the plus sign (+) expands the thread or branch, displaying the hidden postings beneath it.

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