Participation is a large portion of your grade during this course. Studies have shown that peer to peer education and student lead education leads to higher retention rates, than expert or Teacher driven discussions.

Therefore, every week each of you will be responsible for Posting your own unique response to questions and for responding to your colleague's comments at least twice a week.

Each week one of you will be responsible for leading or moderating a Forum (most weeks we will have two forums running). Your participation grade will be heavily weighted on how well and often you lead these discussions. Each person that moderates a forum will also be charged at the end of the week, with grading their peers-which counts towards participation grades. As a moderator, you are also charged with providing a summary of main points, discussion parameters, and how well the topic was covered as the last post of the topic )this should be done Sat eve or Sun each week).

Please see Discussion Board/Forum Matrix and our Syllabus for a more thorough outline on grading parameters.

Since I'm just getting to know all of you and vise-versa, let's use this first week's discussion board for practice on posting discussions/questions and for getting to know each other. I will always set the first questions of the week out-but feel free to start your own threads-especially if something is confusing you!