Earlier this week, American tennis player Serena Williams won her first round match at the U.S. Open. Not much of a surprise, really, despite her inactivity over the past year. After the match, she was interviewed live on television. The interviewer made a comment about students going back to school soon and Serena said that she, too, was going back to school as an online student. The interviewer asked how she had time for that and Serena jokingly said that maybe she would have her sister, Venus, do the work in her online class because she is smarter. It was a joke, but it's not too far off a perception many people have about online learning –– that because students are not physically in a classroom, it's easy to have someone else do the work. It's a variation on Peter Steiner's "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" cartoon.
Tracking is a feature in Moodle forums which will highlight unread forum messages so you can easily see what is new to you. You can turn tracking on and off for individual forums, but in order to use it, you must first turn it on in your profile. Instructors have the option of turning tracking on or off or making it optional for each forum they create in a course. This means if your instructor turns off tracking, you won't be able to track posts in a forum. The default setting is optional, so each student can decide whether or not to track posts. If you turn on tracking for a forum and you are also subscribed to that forum (receiving copies of posts via email), you will notice that posts you've been emailed will be marked as read once you return to the forum in Moodle. There is no communication between the email message and Moodle –– as long as you are sent the post via email, Moodle will mark it as read. If you aren't going to read forum posts via email, you may want to tu...
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