Forums are sites within an online course that facilitate two-way discussion between you and your students, and among your students.
There are two types of forum activity, forum and Open forum. Regardless of the forum type chosen, participants will not be able to view forum notifications until they are subscribed to the forum.
Default forums provide participants a platform for asynchronous discussion. Within these forums, teaching staff can set 5 different forum options including:
- The Standard forum for general use, any participant can start a new topic at any time. All topics and their replies display at once, with the user's chosen layout (in nested form, if no layout is chosen).
- The Standard forum displayed in a blog-like format works like the Standard forum for general use, but displays differently. Only the first post of a new topic displays on the forum page (the most recent topic first, as in a blog); users click Discuss this topic on that post to view and join in the discussion.
- A single simple discussion is useful for short, focused discussions. It allows for a single thread, which displays on a single page. If an instructor attempts to create further threads, when submitted these new posts will be hidden from view, although they will be listed on the course home page as unread posts. For a format allowing multiple threads, select one of the Standard options.
- In a forum where Each person posts one discussion, each participant can only post one new discussion topic, although they can all reply to each others' topics. This is useful when you want each student to, say, reflect on the week's topic, and everyone else to respond to their reflections
- In a Q and A Forum, a question is posed in the initial post of a discussion. Students must reply to this question with their own answer before other students' replies will be visible to them.
For more information on the different options and their features, visit the moodle.org 'Using Forum' page
To help you decide whether to use a blog, a wiki or a discussion forum, visit the page Blog, wiki or forum—which should you use?
Set up a forum
Click 'Get Started' to view the step-by-step guide.
Important settings
Forums include dedicated settings found in the administration bar of any forum. Teaching staff may want to consider these options to enhance the student learning experience:
- Subscription mode & Read tracking are found under the ‘Subscription and tracking’ section; providing options for teaching staff to decide how they want participants to receive notifications to the particular forum. One example, if enabled, automatically subscribes participants to the forum upon being enrolled into the course. Additionally. Read tracking helps participants know where they last left off in the forum discussion.
- The ‘Attachments and word count’ section provides teaching staff to decide how many attachments can be uploaded, the size of the attachments and the word count within any given reply to the forum. Limiting these options may provide students to be more conscious of how they word their responses or prevent lengthy replies.
- ‘Discussion locking’ provides options to lock forums after a certain period of time if no replies have been made. This is useful in situations such as having a discussion forum dedicated to an assessment which has already elapsed. Users with the proper roles can reply to the forum to unlock it again.
- ‘Post threshold for blocking’ can prevent participants from sending multiple replies within a given timeframe ranging from 1 day to 1 year. This may be useful when teaching staff only want students to reply once to a forum such as in the case of submitting feedback.
Additional features
View and manage forum subscribers
Click 'Get Started' to view the step-by-step guide.
View student participation
The ‘Report’ section within the forum administration bar will provide an overview of student participation in the forum. Staff also have the ability to export posts made by participants within this section.
Export discussions
Click 'Get Started' to view the step-by-step guide.
Mark posts as read
Participants have the option to “Automatically mark forum posts as read”, this is found as an option in their personal Moodle preferences.
Enable and grade forums
Click 'Get Started' to view the step-by-step guide.