In response to last week’s Blackboard Tip of the Week about making a Discussion Board Forum read-only by changing the status of student participants in the Forum to that of Reader (Read the Tip), some faculty have indicated that they use the alternative method of locking a Discussion Forum to prevent users from creating new threads or replies in that Forum.
A quick comparison of the two methods highlights both the difference between them and how they can be used in different contexts.
When you lock any or all of the threads in a Discussion Forum, you are performing a Thread Action—that is, you are changing the status of a thread (Note: you can only change the status of Discussion Forum threads if you are in List View). You select the check boxes for any threads whose status you want to change, and then select Lock from the Message Actions menu at the top of the Discussion Forum window (Show me how to do that?). When you do this, you select Lock instead of other available thread actions, such as Hide, Publish, Unlock, or Make Unavailable.
By comparison, if you change the status of any or all of the students in your Discussion Forum from that of Participant to that of Reader, you are changing User Roles. When you do this, you select Reader instead of other available user roles, such as Manager, Moderator, Grader, or Blocked. As opposed to controlling whether Discussion Forum content is accessible to users, or on what level it can be accessed, you are instead defining the degree to which users can interact with Discussion Forum content.
When would you change the status of a thread, instead of changing a user’s role, or vice versa?
Using the example from last weeks Tip of the Week, an instructor would change her/his students’ status to that of Reader in order to allow them to continue to read, but not edit or contribute to, a Discussion Forum whose deadline had passed. If the instructor were instead to Lock all of the threads in that Discussion Forum, students would be able to read those threads, but not reply to them. However, they would be able to create new threads in that Forum (and, consequently, reply to new threads that had been created). In this scenario, locking the Forum threads would not provide the solution that the instructor was looking for, unless the instructor also changed the options for the Discussion Forum so that the option for allowing users to create new threads was disabled (How do I do that?).
Where locking Forum threads would be highly effective would be in a situation, for example, where you have created a thread that you want students to view as an exemplar or guide and reflect on as a basis for composing their own threads and replies to threads, but which you don’t want them to directly reply to. In this instance, you would lock your exemplary thread so that students could read it and learn from it, but not reply to it.
For more information on performing thread actions or changing user roles in Blackboard, or if you have any questions about those topics, please feel free to contact the Distance and Online Learning Office (629-7070 / DLHelp@hvcc.edu).
Published: Fri, 21 Feb 2014 13:33:56 +0000 by m.petersen