How to Post Comments in the Course Forums – Script

Hello – this is Kerry Gubb with some more handy ACCM instructions.

This time we’re responding to postings in the course Discussion Forum.

I’ve logged and am now looking at the Small Group Leadership Home Page.

One of the main options, which looks similar on every course Home Page, is the Forum option. As per the directions, I click on the picture and arrive at the Course Forum, which consists of a number of discussion threads, to which I can choose to respond.

As you can see, there are (at this moment in the life of Small Group Leadership course web) three forums from which to choose. The Class 1 discussions contain 8 topics and I want to respond to one of them.

I select Class 01 Discussions, then when that page opens I click on the discussion thread with the subject of Your Thoughts and Feelings. I type in a suitable subject for my response ... (if you don’t type a subject, the web will automatically insert the first line of your response as a subject). I type in the response itself ... and I can click on the Save button to submit my comment. I can also add an attachment to it. In this case I think I’ll upload a picture of me so others in the class can have a better idea of who they’re dealing with.

It doesn’t have to be a picture, through – you can attach a document file, a PDF file – in fact anything that’s on the list of acceptable file types.

I select the Attachments link, select New and from the dropdown list of acceptable file types, and JPG is the one I want. I browse to it on my computer and type in a brief description of what it is.

It’s a quirk of the current version of Internet Explorer that I then need to stretch the size of this window far enough to reveal the Upload button, which I click on – and click the close button. You can see my picture file listed under the word “attachments”.  I click on Save and my message is now posted in the Discussion forum.

You can see at the bottom of my response that I can edit, delete or add and take away attachments to whatever items I’ve posted. I can’t edit somebody else’s work but I can edit my own contributions.

The REPORT option is for alerting us to the presence of any offensive or inappropriate material – which we’ll deal with immediately we know about it.  That’s never happened yet; we hope it never will.

Let me show you one other thing. I click on the appropriate breadcrumb link to get us back to the forum main page -- and then we’ll take a quick look at the forum archive.

Essentially,  this is a collection of all the input and student comments from this course previous to the major upgrade we had from Coldfusion to Web Content Management on the ACCM web site in late February 2010.

As you can see, the Forum Archive for Small Groups can be “viewed here”, so I click on that link.

A separate window opens ... and here is the archive. I can browse through it at leisure and see what previous students have contributed.

When I’m finished, I close out of that window and I’m back at the Small Group Leadership forum.

I can return to the home page by clicking on the link to it in the left-hand menu.

And that’s it for our quick tour of posting comments in the Student Discussion Forums.