Course Communications

Meaningful interactions among students and instructors are the hallmark of a successful online class. Canvas supports several types of communication, as described below.

In addition, registered students have Penn State e-mail accounts (<Access Account ID>@psu.edu) that they need to monitor for any official communications that come from the University or from the Penn State World Campus.

Announcements

Announcements are messages from your instructor that contain important information. Current announcements can be accessed through the Announcements tab in Canvas. Announcements may highlight assignment due dates (also published in the course Calendar), lesson recaps, a preview of an upcoming lesson and other essential course information.

Discussions

Discussions allow students to interact with the instructor and other classmates. Threaded discussions allow multiple posts and replies. New posts appear in the Course Activity Stream page, so you will know when something has been posted.

In general, questions and comments about project assignments and course content should be shared with the entire class via the discussion forums. That way, everyone can benefit from the discussion.

Please note that in the discussion forums default mode, it is very difficult to keep track of whether you've read a post or not. To override the default mode setting, perform the following steps:

1. Use the Discussions link in the main menu to open a view of all discussion forums. 

[If the Discussions link is not available in the main menu (it is visible in some courses and not in others), simply enter any discussion forum, find the Discussions link at the top of the page, and click the link. Proceed to step 2.]

2. Click on the gear/cog icon in the upper right to open the Edit Discussions Settings dialog.

3. Under My Settings, check the box for Manually mark posts as read, and then click the Save Settings button.

4. After you've changed the default settings, you can click on the blue dots to the left of discussion posts to more easily keep track of what you have and haven't read. 

GEOG 594b uses four general types of discussion forums:

1. The Lounge - This is a forum for personal introductions and other social (not course-related) discussions.
2. The Conference Room - This is a forum for course-related discussions that don't pertain to a particular Lesson or Project.
3. Technical Issues - Post technical issues here.
4. Lesson specific - Post your replies and comments to the discussion questions here.

Conversations

Conversations is the equivalent of e-mail in Canvas. It's great to use for a quick e-mail to another student, instructor, or a whole team. Keep in mind that the text editor is very minimal, and does not have much formatting capability.

• Please use course mail only for private messages to instructors or fellow students.
• Many instructors prefer to keep course mail within the course management system, except for emergencies.
• Whenever you post a message in a forum or send course mail, please entitle every message with a descriptive subject line. Subject lines that include the gist of a question or comment increase the chances that students and instructors can retrieve the messages we're looking for. Poor subject lines, such as "Question" or "Lesson 1," are useless as search keywords.