Read the Course Guide
This guide includes important information about the course objectives, schedule, assessment, communication approach, evaluation, instructors list and more. Make sure you read this carefully before starting the course. Downloadable version available here.
3. Communication
Most of the course communication will take place either in Your Course forum or 2 topic forums. While at times it is perfectly good to just tell another participant or facilitator thanks for a good idea or that you agree, many posts should do more. The best posts should contribute to the discussion by sharing your ideas, posing an answer, asking a useful question, or sharing a relevant experience. You are expected to:
- Only post thoughtful responses
- Stay on topic (or start a new discussion if appropriate)
- Be constructive rather than critical in your responses (remember that readers cannot hear your tone of voice or see your expressions)
- Use respectful, appropriate language
- For technical postings, clarify words that may cause confusion
- Provide timely responses
How forum contributions to forums should be formulated:
|
Criteria |
Excellent |
Satisfactory |
Poor |
None |
|
Quality of post |
Appropriate comments: thoughtful, reflective, and respectful of other’s postings |
Appropriate comments and responds respectfully to other's postings |
Responds, but with minimum effort. (e.g. "I agree with Bill") |
No posting. |
|
Relevance of post |
Posts topics related to discussion topic; prompts further discussion of topic |
Posts topics that are related to discussion content |
Posts topics which do not relate to the discussion content; makes short or irrelevant remarks |
No posting. |
|
Contribution to the Learning community |
Aware of needs of community; attempts to motivate the group discussion |
Attempts to direct the discussion and to present relevant viewpoints for consideration by group; interacts freely |
Does not make effort to participate in learning community as it develops |
No feedback provided to fellow student. |
Online discussion rubric - Adapted after IDL6543, Instructional Design Team, Center for Distributed Learning, UCF, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license.
Besides forums, there is a Coffee room available where you can chat directly with your colleagues and instructors online.
We encourage you to send us your feedback and reflect on your progress every week using the ‘Reflect’ sections. The more we know about your learning experience, the better we can support you.
How to manage email copies for Forum postings
Each forum posting by default creates an email copy to your email inbox if you are subscribed to the Forum. We generally recommend staying subscribed so you will see the new messages without having to log in to the course web site. The following two methods will help you manage the email flow:
1. You can check your Forum Digest by clicking at your name on top right corner of the course page and "Preferences". Click at "Forum Preferences" and choose Email Digest Type that the best fits to your needs.
"No digest" will copy each posting from any course participant to you email in near real-time, so you will keep an accurate overview of what is been discussed right now. If you prefer less intense emailing, choose "Complete" or "Subjects", and you will receive only one daily digest of postings.
2. Without changing the Forum Preferences, within your own mailbox (Outlook, Gmail, etc) you can set up simple rules to keep your personal email inbox organized. For example, you can create a rule that moves all mails with a title "E-SAC 2018:" to another folder. This way your Inbox stays less busy.