However, students' discussion opportunities and contact with instructors are restricted to scheduled class meeting times and instructors' office hours. Recent interactive implementations of the World Wide Web offer opportunities for sharing ideas, posing questions, and presenting individual discoveries at a time of convenience, and better, at the time of thought. This paper describes the use of World Wide Web-based discussion forums to provide an avenue for sharing information beyond time and place constraints of the physical classroom. WWW Discussion Forums Typical use of the WWW is by passive consumers, searching through information others have made available, bookmarking useful or entertaining sites, and creating individual libraries of information. Web-based discussion forums, on the other hand, are built by participation.
Groups of people work together to create shared libraries of information.
Content is presented as a collection of threaded messages with Web interfaces for perusal of existing threads and submission of new posts. The threaded presentation puts messages on the same topic together and indicates response messages with indentation, allowing readers to follow discussions topic by topic. The discussion forum software also allows participants to upload whole documents as attachments to messages. These documents remain in the same format as when uploaded and are made available to others to download via a link, a convenient mechanism for sharing documents. The discussion forum software has a notification module that delivers, via e-mail, daily notices of new posts on the individual forums.