EBF 301
Global Finance for the Earth, Energy, and Materials Industries

Course Communications

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Meaningful interactions among students and instructors are the hallmark of a successful online class. The two web-based learning environments used in the Penn State courses that use this text—Canvas and Drupal—support several kinds of communication, as described below.

Communications in Canvas

The Canvas course management system supports several modes of communication, including discussion forums, course e-mail, and announcements.

  • Discussions are a kind of public e-mail known as "threaded discussion." Everyone enrolled in the class can post messages of their own and can read and respond to everyone else's messages. A series of messages that make up a conversation is called a "thread." Discussions are used throughout the course for both required and optional communications.
    • In general, questions and comments about assignments and topics in the course should be shared with the entire class via the discussion forums. That way, everyone can benefit from discussions.
    • For more information, see the guide on Discussions.
  • Conversations is private e-mail—only the recipients you designate can read your messages.  A button to "Compose a new message" is provided under the Inbox tab.
    • Please use Conversations only for private messages to me (your instructor), the teaching assistant (TA) or fellow students. I prefer to keep course mail within the course management system, except for emergencies.
    • Announcements are weekly (or more) messages from the instructor that will appear via e-mail. Announcements highlight assignment due dates (also published in the course Calendar) and include benchmarks by which you can tell if you are on track in the course as well as wrapping up lessons and/or asking timely questions related to course content.
    • For more information, see What is Conversations?
  • Subject Lines.  Whenever you post a message in a forum or send course mail, use a descriptive subject line. Subject lines that include the gist of a question or comment increase the chances that recipients can retrieve the messages we're looking for. Poor subject lines, such as "Question" or "Lesson 1," are useless as search keywords.

Have questions? Need help?

There are many ways to get the help you need. See the "Help!" link in the Resources menu (left) to learn more about the people and resources available to you.