Discussion post

This class is intended to be interactive and to involve serious scholarly engagement with the reading assignments and others.  I expect you to be well prepared each week to discuss the assigned readings online with your colleagues.  Each student is responsible for posting original posts and reply postings) in the Discussion Forum for other students in the class to consider.  Each original post should be at least 500 words, and the replies should be at least 300 words. All posts/replies should be posted periodically throughout the grading period—as identified on the course modules and course schedule breakdown.  The questions should be phrased in the form of an analytic inquiry.  This means that students shouldn’t just ask a simple question, they should couch the question in the readings or other scholarly works and offer their perspective.

Students need to take the time to learn about a specific aspect of a topic, summarize the issue, and then meaningfully articulate questions, answers, reflections, questions, criticisms, strategies, and perspectives.  Moreover, cutting and pasting text from readings or online articles is also not helpful - you should rephrase the material in your own words or put quotations around direct quotes from articles.  Always feel free to refer to relevant material when posting - I just don't want to see that the majority of your posting involves quoted material from other sources.  Your Summaries DO NOT count towards your posts/replies each grading period, and MUST NOT be posted to the discussion board. Posting a Summary to the discussion board will result in an automatic ZERO for your Summary grade.

Students are expected to participate on the discussion boards appropriately. This means you should NOT do any of the following: bring up irrelevant information, attack people online for their opinions, attach any file to your emails that has not been checked for viruses, send people in class irrelevant materials or files, and prevent from posting or harass individuals online.