Discussion guidelines
Overview
Below are guidelines and best practices for fruitful interactions.
- Participate. It will enhance your learning experience.
- Be polite, respectful and caring. Opinions are alright, but please respect others’ opinions as well.
- Help each other. We encourage you to reply to your peers’ questions and comments.
More info about discussions in general
More info about giving feedback and support
More info about the ethical code for this course
Discussion Forum Best Practices
Here are a few helpful hints for using the interaction forum. The staff will monitor the interaction forums on at least a weekly basis. Staff absence will be announced on the home page and though a pinned forum post.
- Posts marked with the label STAFF (in blue) are official staff threads that will appear at the top of discussion categories. These threads may answer some of your questions.
- Please search for an answer to your question in the discussion board before posting. It is likely that other students have asked the same question already.
- Actively up-vote other posts, and other people will up-vote yours! The more up-votes your post has, the more likely it is to be seen. Don’t forget to up-vote your own posts!
- Excellent posts will be made more visible by staff.
- It is possible to be promoted to community TA. If your posts are valued as excellent, you may be contacted to become a moderator for a part of the forum.
- If you are reporting a bug, please post it in the Technical Issues category in the course wide discussion forum.
- If you want to be sure your questions are posted using the correct category, we advise you to navigate to the relevant parts of the course under Courseware and using the discussion elements inside the course.
Helpful tips
The interaction forum helps improve your ability to search for and talk about many different topics throughout the course. Here are some friendly guidelines to help you successfully navigate and interact on the forum:
- Be very specific about where you need help. Are you stuck on a particular part of an assessment? Do you need help understanding a particular concept? What have you tried doing so far?
- Give your post a specific title. This will attract the attention of other learners interested in the same issue.
- Use “netiquette,” or common writing practices for online communication. For example:
- Avoid TYPING IN ALL CAPS. Some people read this as shouting, even if that is not what you mean to convey.
- Avoid unnecessary symbols, abbreviated words, texting shorthand, and replacing words with numbers (e.g. Pls don’t rplce wrds w/#s).
- Avoid repeating letters or characters like this: reeepeeaattingggg chaaracterrrss
- Avoid excessive punctuation if possible (e.g. !!!!!!!! or ??????)
- It’s fine to make suggestions, but avoid negative commentary and please do not deliberately "wind anyone up" (flaming).