An early warning system sounds like a great thing for earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis, but it's also useful for instructors in online courses. When students don't set aside time to do their online work, they can quickly fall behind and may end up dropping a course. Blackboard 7.3 has a new feature, the Early Warning System, which can be used to keep tabs on student performance which may be a sign of potential problems. Rules can be created based on test scores, late work or course activity, and it's easy to monitor student progress and send warnings via email. A summary of the features of the Early Warning System in Blackboard is here [PDF].
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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