The Public Discussions feature allows users to leave and reply to public comments within:

• Lessons

• Questions

• the Discussions page

Notes:

• Public Discussions can be turned On or Off at the Course, Institution and Group level.
• Discussions made by students that feature certain "trigger" words will be automatically deleted as soon as they're submitted. The user will receive a false success message to dissuade them from resubmitting the offending comment. The applicable trigger words are maintained internally by BenchPrep and can be updated at the request of the client.
• The feature must first be enabled at the Tenant level, in the Manage Features section of Tenant Dashboard.

Starting a Public Discussion

The easy way to start a public discussion is to type it in the 'Discuss' field at the bottom of any Lesson page. This discussion will be linked to the individual lesson and visible to all other learners on that lesson page, and they can respond to it publicly if they wish.

You can also start a public discussion by following these steps: 

1. Open Discussions from the left-hand navigation bar

2. Select Public

3. Initiate a discussion by either:

   1. Selecting an appropriate Lesson or Question Category

   2. Selecting General if the discussion is unrelated to specific content
      

4. Type your message in the space provide

5. Add a new tag or select an existing tag, to categorize your discussion

   • Note the tag requirements:

     1. Between 3 - 15 characters

     2. No special characters, spaces, or numbers

     3. No more than 5 tags

6. Optional: You can add an image or PDF attachment along with your comment by following these steps:

   1. Select Add Images/PDFs button
      

   2. Find the appropriate saved file you would want to add, click on the file name to select it and click open to add
      
      NOTE: Only these images jpg, jpeg, png, gif and PDF files are accepted by the system
       

7. Select Submit to post your message
   

Interacting With Public Discussions

You can easily filter all discussions by:

1. Their posts
2. Messages with attachments
3. Lesson or Question category
4. Tags

You can alter your posted messages by selecting 'Edit' or 'Delete' from the drop-down menu on the right-hand side of the message.