Introduction to UAS Forums

UAS Online Forums provides an online discussion tool for portfolios. The forum is a multi-threaded discussion tool providing editing capabilities, uploading of multiple attachments, bookmarking posts, and a subscription feature to help you stay current with your Forum.

UAS Online Forums Quick Start

The forums can be used for discussion when they want to provide "threaded" discussions. Each set of messages grouped by a subject is called a thread. The forums visually display the hierarchy of these threads as displayed in item number 3 on this page.

For Success

• Use your e-mail subscriptions to keep up with the discussions.
• Make sure you Preview your response before you Post.
• Be sure that you understand threading and which message you are responding to.
• Use the Title textbox to reflect the content of your posting.
• If you have an active forum and are trying to locate an old message, use the Search tool that is located in several places. It provides the ability to search by user, date, subject, etc.

1. Sign in to UAS Online and go to your portfolio to access the forum. Make sure you go to the correct subpage.  Forums are not spread out over the entire portfolio, but tied to an individual page. 
 
2. The Topic Index shows all active topics while the homesite view will only show the last few topics with recent postings.



<sub>The New column shows how many you have seen out of the total. Keep in mind that “seeing” means scrolling down the page.

View dormant topics - topics may be placed in dormant by faculty to shorten the list. The topics can still be viewed by clicking on the link.

Frozentopics - faculty may freeze the discussion for a topic. Students can still view the post, but they will not be able to respond.</sub>


3. Clicking on a topic will open the Map View, showing threads. Clicking on a thread will open a window with all the content from that thread as shown below.

If you wish to have all the Posts open to be read at one time, click on the Forum Topic which is the top link in the Map View. In this case, it would be "Week 14 Forum A". All the following posts will be opened for reading. (This view is not displayed.)

4. The Thread View shows the linked discussions with a "+" or "-" connecting them. Click Post Response on the message you wish to respond to.

5. In the Post Response textbox you can add multiple attachments, use the spell checker, or format your text. You can use the Preview button to examine your document before you click Post Item.




6. When you are responding to a comment, changing the title of your posting to reflect your comment makes reading the thread much easier.

Make sure you are responding to the correct message, not just the last one you read. When you see a long line of messages trailing off on a diagonal across the page, it's an indication that users are just reading the last post and responding to that rather than finishing the reading and moving up to the thread that started the discussion and responding there.



7.Subscriptions for forums automatically send daily messages to your e-mail account with links to unread messages. An e-mail will also be sent every time someone responds to your posting. Clicking on the links will take you to the unread posting.