Navigating the discussion board & reading messages
Activating the options menu when you first go into a forum enables you to better manage the messages ... more>>
Student comments ...‘Generally a good tool, but a more powerful discussion board engine would aid its usability (eg. more powerful search features, allow option for the content of all discussion messages in a thread to be shown so that each message doesn't have to be clicked to be read - extremely annoying when you have to read more than a couple of messages!)’
‘To read through a number of entries in a discussion puts me under a lot of click-and-wait stress.’
‘How can I read the discussion board more easily?’
There are two common ways of reading messages by threads: you can follow the message trail by using the 'previous message' and 'next message' navigation, or you can collect all the messages of one thread on the same page (this might be a better way to read a set of ideas) ... more>>
Choosing the option to display only unread messages lessens the upload time of the discussion board and only new messages are visible ... more>>
Navigate quickly between different forums on a discussion board by opening a particular forum in a new browser window ... more>>
By using the options menu, you can read the postings in different ways including: all the messages on one page, by threads, as a particular cluster of messages ... more>>
The list of postings in a forum are arranged according to threads (by default) - but they can also be sorted and viewed by date, author or subject ... more>>
Need to quickly scan all the messages in a forum to locate relevant information? ... more>>
When you open a message in a new browser window, you can then use ‘next’ and ‘previous’ to move through the postings in that thread and still easily return to the rest of the messages in the forum ... more>>
So what is it with the OK button at the bottom of every screen? ... more>>
If you want to read all the messages offline you can by collecting them and then either printing a hardcopy or saving an electronic version on your computer ... more>>