UAS currently has two conferencing systems available: Discussion Board and UAS Online Forums. Both are threaded discussion tools and available from any UAS Online course when enabled by the instructor. The UAS Online Forums can also be used by any faculty, student or staff from the ePortfolio system. One of our former systems called Caucus was discontinued as of July 1, 2007.

Enabling Discussions

Both tools can be started from the Instructor Tools in UAS Online. Go to the Communication Tools tab and select which tool you would like to use.

Discussion Board will be available for the students from a link on the Comm Tool area and a link on the blue Navigation Bar at the top of the window.

UAS Online Forums are available on the Navigation Bar and embedded into the Comm Tools area so students can see recent comments when they go to the course site. UAS Online Forums also offers options on setting up your Forums.

Training - contact Barney.Norwick@uas.alaska.edu for training.

Discussion Board - Tutorials
Documentation on using Discussion Board
QuickStart for Students

Flash Tutorial from Blackboard site - The first part of this is not relevent for our implementation. Slide the scroll bar until you get to the Create Forum section.
Flash Tutorial from Blackboard site on Discussion Board options and threading.

UAS Online Forums - Tutorials
QuickStart for Students (MS-Word)

Caucus
Caucus is being phased out during the summer of 2007. A few faculty have requested the ability to capture the content from old conferences. If you only need a few random comments I would suggest cutting and pasting those comments into Word. If you need access to the whole content of the conference then Adobe Acrobat is your best solution. This will require the full version of Acrobat and not just the reader. This should be installed on all faculty computers. Here is an example using Acrobat and here are the instructions for archiving.