Discussion Forums are a Web-based tool for promoting scholarly discussion between students, instructors and guest lecturers. The Discussion Forums are run by a set of Perl scripts and DBM arrays. The Discussion Forum scripts are divided into three main components, administrative, instructor and student. The administrative component that allows the system administrator to establish discussion forum accounts for instructors who in turn create and manage their own forums.
Students then use the forums to exchange information and debate topics.
All three components use Web forms as an interface. Detailed instructions on how to use Discussion Forums can be found in Center for Instructional Technology's Discussion Forum page. It is written for, and has been tested for, using the instructor administration modules and discussion forum modules only. Special thanks to Bob Godwin-Jones and Susan Polyson for permission to use and modify their WCB system. The Discussion Forum system is designed for a UNIX system running either Netscape Communications Server, Netscape Commerce Server or NCSA Server.