Blackboard provides a set of powerful tools for helping you manage its Discussion Board. These tools let you specify whether students can post messages anonymously, modify, or remove their messages, attach files, and create new threads (i.e., discussion branches within a Forum). In addition, you can grant a student Forum administrator privileges and, under extreme circumstances, block students from participating in a forum.

By default, students are allowed to post messages anonymously, attach files to messages, and add threads. Unless you are dealing with a topic of a sensitive nature, you should disable the ability to post anonymously so that students can interact on a more personal basis. To avoid exceeding Blackboard disk quotas, consider disabling the ability to attach files to postings, except when an assignment specifically requires file attachments (e.g., uploading a PowerPoint presentation). Generally, it is a good idea to let students modify and remove their own messages. Blackboard doesn't provide a spell checker and students will typically ask to edit or remove postings because of misspellings and typos (or hasty postings, with inappropriate wording or ill-conceived ideas).

You can grant a student enrolled your course Forum administrator privileges, which allows the student to assist you in monitoring and guiding discussions in the Forum. A Forum administrator can remove other student's messages and block student postings. This level of responsibility offers a student valuable experience in learning how to orchestrate and moderate online discussions.

As a last resort, Blackboard provides the option of blocking a student's participation in a Forum. This prevents a student from posting or replying to messages in the designated forum. However, blocking a user's participation in a Forum should be used rarely, if ever. It might signify to the rest of your class a "loss of control." Every effort should be taken to find another means of dealing with a disruptive student (--see the above suggested rules of online conduct to help manage student behavior in your discussion Forums).

Other Forum management tools include the ability to lock or unlock a discussion thread, remove messages, and archive threads. Locking a thread "freezes" the postings so that changes cannot be made, while preserving the messages for viewing. You might want to lock a thread that seems to be digressing from the topic of the forum or when you think the fruitful discussion on the topic has be been exhausted.

The ability to remove messages can come in handy, if a student posts inappropriate or offensive material. For example, racial slurs are uncommon, but occur. This kind of postings should obviously be immediately removed and the offending party dealt with accordingly. Archiving a discussion thread removes it from the Forum but saves and allows students to view the contents. This feature is convenient for reducing the clutter in an active forum, archiving inactive threads lets students more easily focus on the active conversational branches (--for details on how to use these tools, please refer to the Blackboard 6 Manual in the Resource Links section below).

Resource Links