Setting Completed Discussions to "View Only"

The following Q&A came from the Blackboard Communities site to our team via its weekly "digest." Since we've had a few faculty over the years ask us about making completed discussion forums visible (but not editable) by students for the rest of a course, we wanted to share this with our UHCL Blackboard users who may be interested in a solution to that request.

Question: "Is there a way to make a graded Discussion forum available so that students can see their previous posts without allowing them to post again? In other words, I’ve graded the forum, and I don’t want to give the students the opportunity to post again, but I would like for them to see their previous work. "

Answer: If you go into the forum, and click the "select all" icon to select every thread, one of the thread actions available is "lock."  This allows every thread chain to be read, but there are no reply options.  If you then edit the forum settings and uncheck things like "Allow Members to Create New Threads," the forum will be read only.