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Q & A Forum in Scholar

By Sal Meyers, Sep 10, 2014

Scholar has a variety of different types of discussion forums. One of my favorites is the Q&A forum. This forum requires students to post their own response before they can read any other response. For example, I’ve been having students write 3-2-1 summaries of the readings (a strategy I learned about from Kate Lerseth, Professor of Education). I have students list the 3 most important points in the reading, the 2 things they found most interesting, and 1 question they have. I have students submit their 3-2-1 summaries in a forum rather than as a Scholar assignment, because I want my students to be able to read all the other 3-2-1 summaries when they study for exams. However, I don’t want students to be able to read the other posts before they have written their own.

The trick to successfully using a Q&A Forum is to put the question in a message you post rather than in the Description box. To create the forum, turn on editing and then click “Add an Activity or Resource.” Enter a name for the forum (e.g., “3-2-1 for Chapter 2”). Then in the Description box, write an instruction like the following: “Please reply to the message I posted below.  After you have replied and your message has been posted (which takes 30 minutes), you’ll be able to read the responses of all the other students in class.”  Under Forum Type, select “Q and A forum.” When you are done creating the forum, click “Save and display” at the bottom of the screen.

You will now be in the forum itself. Click the button labeled “Add a new question.” Enter a subject line such as “Read and reply to this message.” Then type your question (e.g., the 3-2-1 instructions) in the Message box.  Click “Post to forum.”