Mercy College's distance learning program has developed a set of criteria for evaluating the quality of each message. According to these criteria, a good message is: substantial (relates to the course material), concise (one screen may be the ideal message length), provocative (encourages others to respond ), hermeneutical (expands concepts or connects ideas in new ways), timely (occurs in a reasonable time frame - when the topic is under discussion), logical (supports point of view with reasons and evidence), and grammatical (is well written). Only those comments that meet these criteria of a good message receive full credit.