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, enable Edit mode top right and 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.
Click once to go straight to the setup screen or click the i for more details then click
Add bottom right.
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 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 question mark you see
the 'Help' and you can find out more.
There are other settings which might be worth exploring, for example in Availability you
can set due dates and cut-off dates for forum posts.
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 a forum if no one has replied after a certain time.
If you enable Whole forum grading, you can grade Forum discussions and these grades get
sent to the gradebook.
We will leave this for now.
In Activity completion if we want to track that students have accessed the Forum, do
we want them to manually click to confirm they have seen it, or do we want it automatically
marked complete when they have simply viewed it or based on certain criteria such as a
number of discussions or replies?
No need to click View as well if you are specifying other criteria.
To alert course participants that a Forum activity has been added or updated, click
Send content change notification
To get started on our Forum now, we save and return to course.
As a teacher if we enter the Forum to add a new discussion topic we can either quickly
post to the forum or click Advanced for other options such as adding an attachment or pinning
a post to the top.
In this Moodle site the admin has also allowed teachers to set a display period.
Let's pin this post so we can see how it displays for students...
and there is a pin icon here.
In a different Forum in a different course, we can see some other settings.
Discussions can be easily starred and for students this will move the discussion up
under any pinned posts.
Forum discussions may be ordered in various ways for instance by last post.
Everyone can easily subscribe to individual discussions or to the whole forum.
From the three dots on the right, a teacher can unpin a discussion or pin a new one.
Or manually lock a discussion.
If you change your mind, as the teacher, just post in the forum again to unlock it.
Finally, it’s useful to know that teachers can send private replies to students which
only the student can read but not reply to.