As you review your learning objectives and seek to map the course materials with the course activities, think about how you can make your course structured around forums and chats.

It may seem hard to envision at first, but in practice it's actually quite simple. As you set up your course, ensure that you include a forum in each of your units. Then you can use the forum for the following purposes:

• Making instructional materials available. The advantage of having them in the forum is that you can let the instructors comment and add more materials, commentary, and so on.

• Asking instructional materials-focused discussion questions. The students can read the materials and immediately comment and share their impressions.
• Posts of drafts and peer reviews. This is a great place to post drafts of papers or comments, and then solicit responses and peer reviews from students.
• Post rubrics, both for peer reviews and final grading.
• Post current controversies, links to articles, and multimedia links.