When we upgrade Blackboard this summer, one of the benefits will be a newly designed discussion board. The look and feel of the discussion board has been refreshed and looks much more contemporary. User avatars are shown beside discussion board posts. These avatars will also be shown beside blog posts and in a few other areas.

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User avatars are shown beside discussion board posts. These avatars will also be shown beside blog posts and in a few other areas. In this screenshot showing all the threads within a discussion board we see a smaller avatar showing which user made the original post for each thread.

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One interesting new feature for instructors is a setting to only allow students full access to the discussion board after they have made a first post. This can be useful to encourage students to contribute to discussions. However this feature is of course entirely optional.