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A Tour of the Forums

The Sage Forums is where you will find weekly discussion topics for your Lessons, and it is also a place to discuss more general aging topics with your fellow students.  The instructors will lead the weekly discussions.  If you have a question or comment pertaining to the course, you should make sure to email your instructor about it directly, rather than posting it in the Forum where all students are participating.

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Weekly Discussion Topics

In most cases each week's Lesson will include one or two topics of discussion.  These topics can be found listed in your Lesson and also on the Forum for that week.  After clicking on "Forums" from the menu bar look for the Lesson you are on and click the title to enter.  Once a topic is active you will find it on this page.  Each discussion topic has a set time span that is specified in your syllabus.   Click on the topic's title to enter and read the discussion.  You can also add to the forums by creating your own discussion topics.

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General Discussion

At the top of the Forum list for your course there is a Forum titled, "General Discussion".  In this forum you can make "threads" (or discussion topics) to start your own discussions.  This Forum is for aging discussions that are not directly related to the week's Lesson.

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Reading the forums

Discussion topics in the Forum are broken down into posts.  To the right of a discussion thread is a listing of the people who have been participating thus far.  Clicking on a user's name in this list will take you to their profile.  To the left of each post a box provides details about who posted it and when.  If you are looking at your own post there is also a link to edit the entry.

The text can be formatted in order to help get your point across and you can also share links with the group as well.  For more information on formatting your own posts see the "Posting to the Forums" tutorial.  When text appears in an inset green box it is a quote.  Quotes might be from some portion of the conversation before it, or it might also be from an outside site.

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Watching a Discussion

At the top of any discussion there is a check box labeled "watch topic".  If you click the check box and then the "Set" button the label will change to "Watching Topic", you have now added the discussion to your watch list.  Watching a discussion allows you to keep track of multiple threads at once by going to a summary page of the new posts in your marked threads.  You can reach your summary page from the forum menu at the right of the forum or from your home page (reached by clicking your name in the gray bar above).

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