Using the Discussion Board Viewing Options
Once messages begin to stack up in the discussion board, it is useful to have ways to manage them. Blackboard provides some tools for this. First is the indentation within each thread, mentioned in the forum creation exercise. It's shown in the illustration, which comes from a course in which students can create their own threads during the discussion.
Note the paper clip: it indicates that the student has attached a file to the message.
"Sort By:" Menu. Below the list of links to the thread is a small menu that allows you to sort the messages according to thread, by author, by date, or by subject. This can be useful if you're looking at a particular student's participation, or returning to a particular post you can't find at a glance. As soon as you select one of these options, the sort happens immediately.
At the top left of the discussion forum are additional options:
- Text links allowing you to Expand or Collapse the threads, which you can also do by clicking the individual + or - symbols in the message list.
- A text link that allows you to Search messages by author and/or keywords.
- A tab to Show Options. When you click this tab, the view changes: the name of the tab changes to Hide Options, a toolbar is added, and select boxes appear next to every message. You can select an individual message you want to perform a particular function on, or select multiple messages with Select All, Unselect, or Invert (the latter will switch so that previously selected items are unselected and unselected items are selected).
Select messages as you like and click the Collect button to display them all on one page. Note that when you display messages using Collect, they are marked as read. If you reply to one of them from the screen of collected responses, you re-enter the thread organization. You can return to your collection after you finish posting response by using your back button on your browser.
If you want the collected posts to appear in a separate window, click Collect, then right-click (Mac: Option-click) the response button and choose "open in new tab" (Firefox, Netscape) or "open in new window" (Internet Explorer). Unfortunately, this 'view all' ability shows posts in chronological order rather than threaded by discussion, which can be confusing.
