Ground Rules
As a student of Food Security and Sustainability: Food Access you are part of a diverse learning community that is at the heart of a meaningful learning experience. The discussion forum is an essential part of this online course. Be it online or in person, a healthy learning community starts with some ground rules:
- Be respectful. Please respect your fellow students. Debate and pushing on ideas is part of a healthy and thriving learning community, but only when it is done in a polite and respectful manner. Insulting, condescending or abusive words will not be tolerated and will be reported and removed.
- Be constructive. A learning community is about learning with and through engagement with one another. When commenting on each other’s projects, try to offer constructive feedback and suggestions that help them improve it.
- Be sensitive. This is a global forum with participants from many different cultures and backgrounds. Be sensitive when discussing race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or controversial topics since others may be more sensitive about them than you are.
- Post appropriately. Content that violates the Terms of Service is not permitted. You may not post inappropriate (eg. pornographic) or copyrighted content, advertisements or promotions of outside products or organizations, or spam the forums with repetitive content.
Please help us create a healthy learning environment by respecting the code of conduct. We trust that students like you will keep our forum communities strong and healthy.
What makes a good post?
The main goal of the forums is to provide a place where dialogue can build as the collective learning community digs into this content together. The forums are there for all learners to have a deeper, more meaningful learning experience, but there are a few things to consider when posting in the course forums:
- Read before posting. Your comment or question should build on what’s already been discussed. If you have a question, scan through to see if it’s already been addressed and use the search function to avoid creating duplicate threads and find the most appropriate topic thread to post in.
- Use informative titles. Keep your post titles short and on-topic so the forums are easier to navigate. If you’re asking a question, it should go in the title.
- Make it easy to read. Present facts and background information in your post. Don’t capitalize or bold entire sentences as this makes the forums harder to read. Check your posts for spelling or grammatical errors.
- Stay on topic. Don’t change the topic of a thread or split a thread into multiple discussions. If you are discussing something that is not directly related to the course materials, pick one thread instead of discussing over multiple threads. And please, don’t post the same post/question in more than one forum.
- Help keep the site friendly. If you think a post or comment is mean, insulting, too violent, or otherwise inappropriate, click “Report” to let us know about it.
- Do not post answers to assessment questions. You may discuss how to approach a problem or help other students who may have questions, but please do not directly provide answers.
Please consider these guidelines when posting in the course forums. They were created to serve the community and make the forums welcoming and easy to use. If you have other suggestions to add, please let us know!