FORUM GUIDELINES

General Guidelines for Quality Online Discussions

In order to efficiently learn, discover and conquer a topic, posts should meet at least one of the following criteria:

A quality post should:

• Exemplify the correct use of a theory, concept or tool studied in class.
• Bring inside knowledge on a given topic, deriving from the student’s own experience or from a research s/he has done.
• Be a specific company example, which illustrates and explains differences in practice across business settings.
• Be a thought process for thinking through a problem, taking into account key issues introduced in the course.
• Open the discussion in a new direction. This will usually result in a new thread being created.
• Summarize several postings and emphasize and clarify a central learning point.
• Challenge the discussion in a thread to the point where it is persuasive enough to move the thread into a different direction.
• Be worthwhile to be remembered by students and professor alike, and possibly be mentioned in the session summary.
• Be direct and quickly get to the key point.

Importantly, a quality post will extend the discussion beyond what you can find by “Googling.” It is appropriate to research an issue by using the Internet; however, your posting should be more than the quick results of a Google search, or any other type of search for information (after all, anyone can do that). If your post is based on information you found on a search, you need to extend your searched information by adding thought, analysis and insight.

Within each course, your professors will provide you with guidelines and indications of what they expect from your posts on that course, and thus how they will evaluate it. Make sure you pay close attention to, and follow, their indications for their courses. Nonetheless, you can consider these items above here as further help for you to understand what quality online discussion in general is.

The fact of not posting in the forums or doing so in a very reduced way may have consequences on the final grade you will obtain in each subject, as professors will have very little evidence on which to evaluate the participation of each student in the forums.

Attendance to forums: you are considered to have attended a forum if you have posted at least one post per forum: otherwise, it is considered an absence (reading the posts does not suffice).