Forum Guidelines

Composing your own postings

• Search before writing. Many topics already exist. Avoid repetition by using the search function first.
• Stay on topic. While even with subject-oriented topics it’s possible for a off-topic remark to occur, these comments shouldn’t be the main component of a posting
• Formulate your questions and answers precisely and understandably.
• Name your sources when you quote or refer to other Internet pages.
• Choose meaningful headlines when creating threads.

Netiquette

• Stay friendly and factual.
• Be cautious with humor and irony.
• Give Feedback.

Of course it’s possible in a forum that from time to time posts and topics can turn up that contradict - more or less strongly - these guidelines. On one hand, the points mentioned are highly dependent on personal interpretation and, on the other hand, nobody’s perfect.

The following behavior will not be tolerated on openHPI

• Personal conflicts carried out in the public sphere
• "Trolling" and "flaming", i.e. releasing posts or topics that are intended to deliberately provoke strong negative or emotional reactions - Spam, i.e. posts with e.g. advertising contents - Harassing or threatening other participants - Language which is hurtful, threatening, insulting, defamatory, obscene, hateful or racist

Depending on its severity, a violation of these rules may result in a warning or a temporary or permanent exclusion from the platform.

How to use the forum features: votings, comments, questions and discussions

Writing a post in the course forum is quite easy to do and we strongly encourage our learners to use the course forum since active interacting with your fellow students will contribute to your learning experience and progress in contrast to only passively consume the learning materials. But: The more participants are using the course forum the more important it is to keep it easy to navigate through.

This is why you should reflect about the purpose of your post for a moment and ask yourself the following questions:

• Does the question I want to ask already exist? - You might find an already existing thread about your issue when browsing and searching the forum. You can comment on that question or just vote it up to indicate "The same issue is also important to me!" (for details see below) .
• What is the purpose of my post? - Do I want to open an thread for asking a new question to get an answer from the community or do I want to start a new discussion about a certain topic?

Voting posts up & down

You and other learners can vote posts (not comments) up or down to express agreement or disagreement:

Per post each user can only give one vote but a decision can be taken back and changed at any time by choosing the opposite vote. In question threads, both the original question and the answers can receive votes. As in discussion threads there are only comments but no answers, you can only vote up or down the original post opening the discussion.

Asking a question

Clicking on the orange button on top of the forum page will open an edit form to create your post as a question. This is the correct type of thread classification if you want to ask a question and expect an answer. Your peer students and the teaching team can write answers to this question. In addition, you and others can comment on these answers.

marking answers as correct As the question creator, you (and the teaching team) can label one of the answers as correct or helpful by clicking the check mark.

This helps the forum community to quickly see there is no further action required and it will help peers to find the right answer if they have a similar question, as the thread will be labeled as “answered” in the list with all forum postings.

Starting a discussion

Clicking on the orange button on top of the forum page will open an edit form to create a post as a discussion thread. Please use this thread type if you want to openly discuss a topic within the community of your peer learners and the teaching team. Discussion threads are automatically marked with the label to easily identify those in the forum list with all threads.

A Reply in a discussion is created by clicking the button. As discussions are open, there is no function to mark one comment as a correct answer.

Tagging threads

If you create a new thread (discussion or question), please make use of the tagging functionality. Best practice is to add one meaningful tag to provide the context for the discussion or question. These tags will be displayed in the discussion forum list.

Pinned threads

Some threads with important questions or discussions or containing important information by the instructors can be pinned which means they will appear at the top of the forum list.

This page was last changed at Tue, 21 Apr 2015 12:23:22 +0000.