DOCUMENT by: ESC Training
Subject: Responding in Discussions: Threads

Responding to the initial discussion question:

To create an initial response to a module discussion, the student opens the original discussion document, indicated by the icon . Clicking on the respond icon at the bottom of the Discussion Starter page brings up the Discussion Response form. The Subject and the Text fields need to be filled in and the gray Submit Your response button is clicked to submit the response. These responses appear under the initial discussion question, left justified and indented. Each response to the original question can start a "thread". In the discussion menu below, you can see one response to the original question "is online communication in real-time."

Responding to a response:


Students are also expected to respond to other students' responses. The icon you see on a response document is respond to this response. A response created with this icon will be indented under the Response document. In this way, discussion threads are built. The threaded discussion format preserves a record of what item the student was responding to. You may have seen other online discussions where every item appears in chronological order so that one item may refer to a posting several items back. In the example below, there are two responses to the original discussion (the second and bottom lines). The first response has a thread of 5 additional responses.




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