Many faculty use web-based conferences or mailing list fed discussions to allow their students to continue classroom discussions online. For instance, you can create a discussion group called 31.321 (if that were your course number) so that your students can post ideas and opinions about an issue raised in class.
There are three discussion options avaliable for course-related use. Discuss is a text-based application that runs on UNIX and Macintosh computers and is essentially an email list archive. The Stellar discussion board allows you to set up various forums within a class so that instructors and students can post messages and replies. The Stellar discussion board also allows faculty or students to attach files to their messages.MIT Forums are web-based conferences and so are available to all platforms. Participation in MIT Forums conferences requires the use of a Netscape or Lynx browser as well as web certificates for authentication.
Contact Academic Computing's Educational Technology Consultants if you need advice about which option to choose. (et-consult@mit.edu or call 3-0115)
On-line forms are available to request a Discuss meeting or to request an MIT Forums conference or to request a Stellar site.
Another bulletin board system, Usenet News (or Netnews), is available on Athena but is not recommended for course-related use.