Discussions

What is the Discussions Tool?

Use the Discussions tool in your course to encourage students to share thoughts on course material with their peers. You can set up forums and topics for students to ask questions, discuss course content and assignments, and work together in assigned groups.

Accessing the Discussions Tool

The Discussions tool is one of the links found on the default navigation bar of your CourseLink course site and can be accessed directly from that link.

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Location of the discussions link on a face-to-face course site

For Distance Education (DE) courses, the link appears under the drop-down menu of the Tools link on the navigation bar (provided that the course is using Dropbox).

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If you are using a custom navigation bar and the Discussions link has been removed, you may re-add it. For more information on that process, please see our Navigation Bar page.

New Discussions Experience: Creating an open topic

The default setting for a topic is “open”.

Although the message under Group and Section Restrictions says, “Only selected groups or sections can view this topic”, as long as you don’t restrict the topics to specific groups, it will remain open for all students. This is a somewhat confusing message.

You can verify that the discussion topics are open to all students by reviewing the Group and Section Restrictions and confirming that “Restrict topic” is selected (confusing language) and none of the options below are selected.

Using the Discussions Tool

For the most up-to-date information on how to use the Discussions tool, please follow the links below to the Brightspace Help documentation site.

Getting started with discussions

• Create a discussion forum

• Create a discussion topic

• Reply to a discussion thread

• Post to a group discussion topic

• Subscribe to a discussion

• Unsubscribe from a discussion

• Restrict multiple forums or topics to specific groups or sections

• Automatically create restricted topics for groups or sections

• Copy a discussion thread with replies

• Export discussion statistics

• Restore deleted discussion

Moderating Discussions

• Lock a discussion forum or topic

• Hide a discussion forum or topic

• Moderate discussions

Assessing Discussions

• Assess users in discussion threads

• Retrack and re-publish assessment

Creating a graded topic

When creating the topic select the Assessment tab. You will see an option to link the thread to the grade book and give the thread a score.

Tutorial Videos

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Discussion Tool FAQs

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Related Tools

Content

Groups

Grades

Notifications

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Need More Help?

If you're still having trouble, please contact the CourseLink Support team for assistance.

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