Answer:
Netiquette" is a term describing how to interact clearly and respectfully with others in an online environment.
As more and more classes include online discussions, it becomes more and more important for instructors to understand the rules of etiquette that, when followed, help make the individual postings easy to follow, keep conversation threads focused, and the overall discussion on-track. Unregulated, an online discussion can quickly disintegrate into a tangled web of extraneous verbiage, rude language, and inconsiderate behavior guaranteed to derail the conversation. The basic premise is that the etiquette expected of your students in online discussions is the same as that which you expect in a classroom. There is a problem, though: the absence of visual and auditory clues. In face-to-face discussions, these clues contribute a lot of nonverbal nuances of meaning. It's impossible to replicate these nonverbal cues in an online environment.
