"Obvious basic changes that should be made to Angel's discussion fora asap.

Tom

• Having to click a tiny little "Mark This Read" box for every message opened is very time-consuming and hugely distracting. Messages should automatically be marked as read when they are opened. Or (second best) there should be a way to batch-mark a bunch of messages as read.

• It should be possible to open a forum with both "nested" and "unread" as defaults. Currently it's possible to set "nested" as a default, but not "unread."

• It should be possible to tell, by looking at the list of discussion fora, which fora have new messages in them, perhaps with a flag, or color change, or the word "new." Without this it is far too easy, for both faculty and students, to completely miss new postings.

• It should be possible for both faculty and students to set a default "look" to all their posted messages (font, color, size, etc). In a long threaded discussion that helps a person read the back and forth comments much more easily.

• It should be possible to "quote" a portion of (or all of) a message you are replying to, and have it appear in your reply message. This makes compex discussions much more do-able.

• There should be a way to make an expanded view (no +s) the default view in discussion fora.

All of these are extremely basic. Every email program allows all of these. Everyone who uses email would expect these same basic things in their classroom discussion fora.

• Also, it should be possible to open two sections of a class in the same browser so a person can work simultaneously in two sections, side by side. This business of having to use two separate browsers is just silly. When someone is teaching four sections of a class will they have to find four separate brands of browsers?"