Forum: start discussions Being able to discuss our learning with
others helps us to progress and Moodle offers several different types of
discussion forums for you as a teacher to enable your learners to do exactly
that.
To add a forum click the Turn editing on link from the gear menu top
right, then in the section you'd like to add the forum, click Add an activity or
resource.
We can add several forums of several different types; we don't only
have to choose one.
Clicking Add an activity or resource brings up the
activity chooser.
Forum is an activity because students interact with it on the
Moodle course and we can add a forum by clicking the button once and then
clicking Add at the bottom or by clicking the button twice.
There are a lot of settings for the forum but we only really need to give it
a name, a description and then to save it.
The name will be what the learners see on the course and the description if you
wish may be displayed by ticking the Display description on course page box.
We then choose the type of forum we want.
The default is a standard forum which allows anyone to click a button to add a
new discussion topic.
However if you click the drop-down box there are other
types as well for instance a Single simple discussion allows for the teacher
to start a topic and all the learners can do is respond to that particular
topic.
If you want to know what the other forum types are, then clicking the ? you
see the help and you can find out more.
There are other settings which might be worth exploring,
for example you can decide the number and size of attachments that you wish to
allow your learners to attach and you can set a word count which learners will
see when they add a forum post.
Another important element is subscription: do you
want your learners to be automatically subscribed to the forum to automatically
receive notification of replies, or do you want them to be able to choose?
Discussion locking allows you to close the forum
if no one has replied after a certain time.
To get started on our forum now we just need to scroll down and save and
return to course.
As a teacher if we go into the forum and add a new discussion topic we can do
something students cannot do, and that is make a forum post sticky by pinning it
to the top of the thread.
If we click that option now and post to the forum,
you can see what it looks like.
Finally it's useful to learn a little more about
forum subscriptions.
Here is the course discussion forum on a different Moodle
site with a different theme.
Learners can choose whether to subscribe to the forum or not; they can also choose
whether to subscribe to individual discussion threads or not and therefore
get notifications of any replies.
Our participant here is already subscribed
to the top discussions as shown by the envelope but she's not subscribed to the
bottom discussion.
She can subscribe either by clicking the icon, or when she goes into the
discussion she can subscribe from the link at the top and she can also set her
notification preferences when replying to the discussion.
If the site administrator has enabled it she can also reply to the forum posts by
email but this is a setting that is disabled by default.