Compiled by Tom Rocklin.

This month's Virtual Companion is designed to accompany the Techped article "Meeting in Virtual Space" in The National Teaching and Learning Forum, Volume 9 Number 3.

If you want to use a bulletin board with your students, you'll need some software to run it. In many situations, you'll already have access to a product (or several products) your institution has developed or bought. Clearly, if that product meets your needs, you'll want to take advantage of the support your institution can provide and choose from among your institution's offerings.

If, on the other hand, you are looking for some software to implement a bulletin board in your teaching, perhaps the feature comparison that follows will be of use to you. The table is based on one prepared by my colleague Sarah Ross-Lazarov and is used (with some additions and deletions) here with her permission. Naturally, you won't be selecting a product based just on this table, but I hope it will alert you to some of the possibilities.

Sarah and I both approached the analysis of these products (mostly) by asking what the student experience would be like. Now that I have all the information in a table, a few observations strike me.

All of the products we looked at thread the discussions, but I was surprised to find that not all of them label new messages. I was also struck by how desirable I find the ability to control access to discussions by creating either private or public forums.

For small forums, the various ways of interacting with the information may not be particularly important. When the forum contains a lot of postings, though, searching and sorting become very useful. WebCT's ability to compile selected messages (that is, put them all into one text file) has come in handy for me when I want to read the bulletin board offline.

I've never allowed anonymous posting in a class, but some people find it a useful way to get feedback about features of the course on an ongoing basis, so it is nice to see that most of these products allow for anonymous posting if the person controlling the bulletin board enables it.

For my taste, the more flexibility people have in posting to the bulletin board, the better. This is the web, after all. It would feel pretty silly to be reading a posting that gives a URL and then have to cut and paste in order to reach it. So, I like to see a lot of boxes checked in the "attachments and included media" section of the chart.

Finally, three of the products we looked at are parts of larger online systems, while two are independent products. If you are interested in WWWBoard or Ultimate Bulletin Board, you'll have to be able to install (or find someone to install) CGI scripts on the web server you are using.

Happy bulletin-boarding!

[Editor's note from James Rhem: The Forum has two open forums for the discussion of topics covered in the publicaton (and others of interest to readers). There are the discussion forum section - like Tom Rocklin's bulletin boards -- and the Talkback feature located in the Special Features section of the Web Site. Frankly, neither one has generated much interesting discussion among and between readers. We've switched the open discussion section so that it is both a "semi-open" forum and a listserv to which readers may subscribe. What that means is that all messages posted to the discussion section are passed to me for approval before they are posted. I now screen out the countless, literally countless pleas from students seeking "all the information you've got" on 'nature versus nurture,' which seems to be the only topic assigned in psychology courses these days, as well as all the advertising and get rich quick schemes flooding all such open forums now. So, IF anyone ever starts writing anything interesting to the discussion section, it will be there and it will-- or can be -- "pushed" to those interested enough to sign up. I'd like to see some interesting discussions there, but it hasn't happened . . .. yet. You could be the one to start it. Just raise your hand . .. .so to speak. And of course there's the Talkback section designed specifically for responding to articles in the newsletter. Agreement, disagreement, fine points all are welcome. -- JR]

	Message Organization and Display
	Threaded	Can make public forums	Can make private forums	Labels new messages
WWWBoardß	X	X
Blackboard Bulletins	X
LearningSpace Bulletins	X
WebCT Bulletin Board	X	X	X	X
Ultimate Bulletin Board	X	X	X	X

	Interacting with the information
	Sort messages by thread or by post date	Searchable	Can limit search to particular fields	Compile	Can link directly to board from course content
WWWBoardß		X
Blackboard Bulletins
LearningSpace Bulletins	§
WebCT Bulletin Board	X	X	X	X	X
Ultimate Bulletin Board	?	X	X		X

	Attachments and included media
	Attach docs to messages	Supports html in message	Images in message	Include live links
WWWBoardß		X	X	X
Blackboard Bulletins	X			?
LearningSpace Bulletins	X			X
WebCT Bulletin Board	X			X
Ultimate Bulletin Board		X		X

	Authors
	Can allow anonymous posts	Can require authors for posts	Independent software
WWWBoardß	X		X
Blackboard Bulletins		?
LearningSpace Bulletins	X
WebCT Bulletin Board	X	X
Ultimate Bulletin Board	X	X	X

a   You can have you course hosted on Blackboard's server at http://www.blackboard.com.
ß   You can also automate daily digests of messages with WWWBoard.
§   LearningSpace courses are divided into four database areas. These areas are the scheduling database, the library, the course room, and the student profiles databases. LearningSpace's bulletin board is located in a larger area called the "Course Room." Assignment documents are also stored here. You can sort discussion threads and assignments by associated post date, student author, and team. You cannot sort messages independent of the threads to which they are attached. Lotus LearningSpace suggested retail $3,500.