Blackboard includes both discussions and journals which provide a space for you to respond to questions or ideas. Both discussions and journals may be used as part of your assessment (marked summative assessment) or class activities (unmarked formative assessment).
Both environments allow you to reflect and discuss topics. Discussions can be public and you can share your views with other students. You can create new discussion posts and reply to other students’ discussion posts. Journal posts however are private and can only be seen by you and your tutor.
Discussions
Discussions are visible to all students in the class or group you have been assigned to. It is therefore important to ensure that you edit your posts carefully before posting and that you are respectful of the other students’ thoughts and ideas. If you do not agree, that is fine, but be sensitive in your response.
You will see the following in your content list for your course, the discussion is represented by two speech bubbles.
To view the discussion assessment, click on the task, you will then see all of the detail of the task. Check how many posts you are to make and if there is a frequency. In this example you can see you should create one post after each seminar. Also check if you are expected to reply to other students’ posts. You will see the box in which you should type your post below the assignment text.
If you see other students’ post, you can respond by clicking on the Reply link underneath the post, typing the message into the Reply box and clicking Reply to post the response. If you start the post and need more time to complete the post, there is a Save Draft option so you can return to the post later to complete it.
Once the assessment has been marked, you will find the mark and feedback in the Gradebook. Click on the purple flag in the Feedback column to read the comments
Journals
Journals are used frequently to reflect on learning and are often employed as either a formative assessment to prepare you for later assessment, or can themselves be used as summative assessment. This can become a dialogue between you and your tutor as these posts are private and cannot be seen by other students. If this journal is to be a space for reflections, it is possible that your tutor will not look at them.
You can identify journal activities by the notebook and pen icon. Click on the assignment to open it.
Read the task carefully, this will indicate how many journal entries you need to make. In the example below you will need to create 2 journal entries.
Journal entries are added in the area below. Any previous entries will be show here too. If you wish to change the number of items per page, select the desired number from the drop-down list. There is a comment link at the bottom of the post which is for your tutor to add comments.
Once the journal post has been marked and the grade posted, it will appear in the gradebook. Here the mark of 50% can been seen, click the purple flag under the Feedback column to read the comments. This mark was summative and has contributed to the overall current mark. It is the only assessment marked so far so is only an indicator of progress.
