Online Discussion Forums
 

For each unit of study, there are discussion forums. You are usually required to make two posts per forum. One of these should be substantive responses to assigned readings and one should be a response to the post of a classmate. The two posts should total a minimum of  600 words per week. The first post should be completed by Friday; the second post by Sunday.

Your grade for the discussion forums will be based on:

  •  the timeliness of your responses
  • the length, quality and substance of your responses
  • your use of assigned readings and citation of those readings and any additional sources you have consulted

An online class like ours depends on everyone being willing to state their ideas publicly and respond thoughtfully to others. In other words, we must all be committed to working cooperatively--and on schedule--to share our ideas and questions.

Your posts should be clearly written (full sentences and paragraphs, standard spelling and punctuation) thoughtful and respectful of others. However, because these posts are our class time together, it is OK to be more conversational than in formal papers. Just a few suggestions:

  • You should describe past events in the past tense ("The merchants of Philadelphia struggled to survive and innovate in the expanding postwar economy."). But when describing what an author has written about the past, use the present tense ("The author discusses the role of the merchant in bringing about economic growth.").
  • Write in the active tense rather than the passive whenever possible ("Henry Ford developed and mass-produced the Model T," rather than "The Model T was developed and mass-produced by Henry Ford.").
  • When quoting from a text (and these should be rare if used at all), simply place the last name of author and page number in parentheses following the quote but before the period ("The customer can have it any color as long as he wants it black" (Ford, 34).). If quoting from another source, cite.
  • Make sure that your ideas are organized into distinct paragraphs that flow logically through the post.