Avenue Communication Tools

Welcome to the Avenue to Learn Communication Tools workshop. This is a blended workshop - meaning that before you attend the in-person session, you will have viewed the resources on this page, tried some of these tasks in a course shell and then attended our face-to-face working session where you will put what you've learned into practice. We strongly encourage you to bring materials that you might use for your course to the session, that way you will be able to use that time for developing your actual course. If you do not have all your materials prepared, that's fine, bring what you can to the session. The outcomes for this course are:

• You will be able to post a News item in your course.
• You will be able to create a Discussion forum and topic.
• You will be able to configure the Discussion tool to best suit your particular marking and reading style.
• You will be able to use the Online Rooms tool to create a Blackboard Collaborate session.

Online discussions are a flexible instructional tool that can help you build a community in fully online courses, can provide peer support and peer marking, or simply can provide a place where students can discuss issues related to the class. As always, when you have a tool that can do many things, it can be overwhelming for both the instructor and the student or learner. When setting up Discussions in Avenue to Learn, you should be able to answer the following questions before starting:

• What are students going to do with this discussion area?
• What outcome do I hope to achieve with this discussion?
• How much is discussion going to be worth (if any grades are assigned at all)?
• Who is going to monitor the discussion board?
• Will I allow anonymous posting?

For a brief overview of the Discussion tool, please view this short video below.

For more information about creating forums and topics, please see the following links:

Creating Discussion forums and topics: https://documentation.desire2learn.com/en/creating-discussion-forums-topics

Creating and replying to discussion threads: https://documentation.desire2learn.com/en/creating-replying-to-discussion-threads

When designing online discussions…..

http://www.online.pitt.edu/faculty/documents/PittOnlineDiscussionBoardBestPractices.pdf

Edutopia's Guide to Facilitating Online Discussions

There are two different ways to look at Discussions, Reading View, which is the default view, and Grid View. To enable Grid View, follow the steps described in the video below.

If you are using Discussions as an assessment method, you will need to consider how you are going to mark learners responses. Are you going to value frequency of posting, quality of posting, quantity of posting or use a rubric based on all of these ideas?

D2L PDF Handout on Marking Discussions

The embedded video below, shows two different ways to mark discussions.

Assess Thread

Assess Student

Creating an online room: https://documentation.desire2learn.com/en/creating-blackboard-collaborate-room

Support resources for Blackboard Collaborate: http://miietl.mcmaster.ca/site/web-conferencing/

This tool is one of the most effective in communicating with your students as it is the first thing they see once they access your course. You can provide announcements, course updates and important information through the News tool.

How to create a news item: https://documentation.desire2learn.com/en/creating-news-item

Task:

Create a welcome message to your students and provide information about your first class in a news item.

For questions or concerns, Avenue support is available from Monday to Friday, 8:30 AM to 4:30 PM at (905) 525-9140 ext. 22911 or email support.avenue@cll.mcmaster.ca.