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On-Line Discussion can complement your in-class discussions in various ways. It can provide an opportunity for students to engage with each other in considering issues in the reading, both before and after you have considered it in class. It can provide a way for you to raise additional questions that you don't have time to cover in class. It also can provide a way for students who are shy in in-person discussions to get involved.  

You could set up an on-line discussion group that is available to students, but not required.  

Advantages:  

• This provides an outlet for additional discussion needs for the course that some students will appreciate. 
• By making this optional, you will not overwhelm beginners with the technology demanded of the course, nor will you absolutely have to train them in whatever discussion format you use. 

• If this is not required, you might end up with a very small group of "regulars" and limited value to the discussion. 
• If students are not required to participate with some regularity, you will be unable to use the discussion group to post information to the class or raise extra questions about the course material. 

Consider requiring that students participate at least once a week in the on-line discussion to ensure that this is a vital part of your course. You might assign some points for participation to provide the necessary incentive.  

Advantages:  

• Reluctant students will be nudged to try this form of communication. Especially for students who are shy about in-class participation, this will lead them to discover other ways of participating. 
• You will be able to take advantage of this added dimension for your class's interaction. 

• If no training is provided on-campus, you will need to arrange a training session in one of the campus labs. 
• Some students will come to resent this extra workload, and you might need to make adjustments in the other expectations for the course. 
• Flaming can get out of control quickly, requiring that you monitor the discussions closely throughout the semester. 
• You will need to devise some method for tracking participation to see that the course requirements are met. 

At present, you can choose from different approaches to on-line discussion:  

Collabra: This is the newsgroup software in the Netscape/Communicator 4 package. (This was called UseNet under "Netscape News," included on the Netscape Web browsers of 2.0 and higher.) You can have an account set up for your class through Academic Computing Services.  

Advantages:  

• If other classes use Collabra, more of your students are likely to know the software. 
• Collabra messages can be "threaded" by topic, date or recipient, so you can see a series of related conversations. 
• The software allows you to send an e-mail response to an individual person who posted a message or post a follow-up comment to that specific comment on the news group. 
• The newer versions of Netscape (anything from 2.0 up) include a newsreader which makes this easier to use than it used to be. 
• if you set up your group on Collabra, students can access it with any usenet program, including IE and older Netscapes.

• If there is no formal training on campus for students, you will need to arrange for a training session that you conduct in one of the campus labs. For beginners, Collabra is no more self-evident than e-mail. Indeed it is much more confusing, as they first have to configure their software for your news server, subscribe to your group, and learn to read and post messages.
• Students working from home on commercial ISPs often have trouble using this. You can set up your  Collabra group with access for all e-mail addresses from your home campus. But some ISPs do not have software on their programs which is easy to configure for access to your group, and you will find it nearly impossible to help them in the abstract without using that particular ISP yourself. 
• The discussion groups seem prone to being unavailable (off-line or overloaded) much more frequently than any other element of the Internet on our campus. This problem occurs whether you use them on-campus or off-campus. 

Examples: 

• Discussion Group Requirements
• Specialized training: Accessing  Collabra from AOL

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