As you are already aware there are significant changes to the Discussion Board since our transition to BB 7.3 and beyond. Let's talk about the particulars.
First and most important you may now set discussion forums to be unavailable to the students until they are needed. Setting the availability also lets you set a date span for particular discussion boards. Just be aware that you will still be able to see all forums even if you have made them unavailable to students. There is a notation below the forums description "This forum is currently unavailable" to let you know which ones the students can and can not see.
The settings for the forums have changed considerably; some of the old setting remain, some new ones have been added and there are still others that have been removed. The old settings that remain unchanged are:
- Allow anonymous posts
- Allow users to modify own posts
- Allow for file attachments
- Allow for the creation of new threads
Allowing for users to remove their own posts was I believe a setting in the last version of BB. It has however been modified a little more. You can now allow for user to either remove all of their posts or to remove only the ones no one responded to.
Some of the new features are totally new and others are old features revamped to function in a different manner. The first of these is post tagging. Having not quite figured out why this is there I am going to make some assumptions according to what I know. Tagging would allow for the application of something similar to a subject line to an entry and because the DB now has a search feature these tags would allow for more detailed searches.
Allowing users to reply with quotes will include the body of the message the are replying to with their response. This may be helpful for the students when replying to a classmates posting.
One of the most interesting new aspects of the discussion is the ability to subscribe to several aspects of the discussion. You can opt not to allow for subscriptions at all. Users can be allowed to subscibe to either the thread or to the entire forum. A subscription to a thread or a forum will send an email to the users address when new materials have been posted.
Rating user posts will perhaps be of assistance if you are interested in doing peer review of any kind. If you are dealing with writing you would be able to post drafts and various iterations of writing assignments so that students will be able rate and give feedback to each other.
Force Moderation will allow you to review discussion postings before they are published to the entire class. This may be viewed as more work as each posting must be reviewed before it can be viewed by the class. This is considered a safety feature more than anything.
You may also flag posts to the discussion similar to the manner that you would flag emails to mark them for follow up.
There are several other smaller things that have changed but I would encourage you to explore a little.
Nancy
