Changes to eClass Discussion Tool

The latest release from Blackboard installed during the summer of 2010 introduced some changes to the Discussion tool that everyone should be aware of.

First is that the summary discussion post tools: ‘All Topics’ and ‘All My Posts’ (2 grey buttons at the top of the Discussions page) are now turned off by default. This change was made to improve the performance of the Discussion tool as they were not really required in courses with very small numbers of topics.

If you utilized this feature in your course previously or have a large number of discussion topics, you can turn these tools on by clicking Manage Course under either the Build or Teach tabs, then selecting ‘Settings Management’ and Discussions. You will need to switch the two options at the very bottom — ‘Enable the All-Topics view’ and ‘Enable the My-Posts view’ — to true to add these buttons to the Discussion page.

The other thing to take note of is the Anonymous Discussion option. Selecting this option for a discussion topic will hide the authors of all posts in the topic, including Instructors and TAs. Furthermore, selecting this option for a Discussion post is irreversible. These changes were made due to student privacy concerns and so that instructors can’t go in after the fact and check up on post authors.

While this is not a change in the function of the tool, Blackboard has not yet updated the Help documentation for this topic which reads “Note: Author names display to Section Instructors and Teaching Assistants.” The documentation also makes no mention of the fact that once selected, there is no option to change the topic back to public.

Let us know if you have any further questions about the Discussion tool in eClass.

CTL E-Learning Support