Objectives:

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

  • Describe the Forum activity in Moodle

  • List benefits and reasons to use forums

  • List the reasons to moderate a forum

  • List the steps to create a forum

  • Add a forum to a course shell

 

What is a Forum?

The Forum activity allows students and teachers to exchange ideas by posting comments as part of a 'thread'. A forum is also known as a discussion board. Files such as images and media may be included in forum posts. The teacher can choose to grade and/or rate forum posts and it is also possible to give students permission to rate each other's posts.

Forums are important because they provide a space for students to discuss what they are learning with their classmates and teacher. This can help to strengthen their learning. Forums also provide a space for students and teachers to interact with each other which is an important part of online learning.

Forum Moderation

After you have created your discussion forum, you will need to moderate it. This means you need to monitor the discussion forum. You want to check if:

  • Students are participating by writing posts and responding to others

  • Students are staying on topic and are posting relevant information

  • There are any inappropriate or offensive posts that need to be deleted

Note that in Moodle you cannot pre-approve posts written by students so regularly checking the discussion forum is important.

Forum Types 

Courses in Moodle automatically come with an announcement forum. This forum is for teachers to post announcements to students only. Students cannot reply or post on an Announcement forum. You can identify an announcement forum by checking the forum type in the settings of the forum. 



There are also 5 other forum types that you can add to your course in Moodle. Review the table below to learn more about each type of forum.

 

Type

Definition

Example

  1. A single simple discussion

A single discussion topic which everyone can reply to.  Cannot be used with separate groups.

You want to assess students’ understanding of a topic so you ask them to summarise a topic.

  1. Each person posts one discussion

Each student can post exactly one new discussion topic, which everyone can then reply to.

You want each student to share their understanding of a topic in a separate thread, and other students to share their feedback. Each student has a topic that’s “theirs”.

  1. Q and A forum

Students must first post their initial reply before viewing other students' posts. This encourages students to share their own opinions without being influenced by the group.

You want students to respond to a topic first before being able to see their classmates' responses. 

  1. Standard forum for general use

An open forum where anyone can start a new discussion at any time.

You want students to share their viewpoints on a topic. Students can post their reflection by starting a new discussion topic, or responding to another’s post. 

  1. Standard forum displayed in a blog-like format

Similar to “standard forum for general use” but with this forum type, you can see the full text of the first post in each forum.

Same as above but students can get a glance at everyone’s answers without having to click into each discussion topic.

 

How to Create a Forum

  1. Turn on edit mode and select “Add an Activity or Resource”.



  1. Select the Forum activity from the Activity Chooser.



  1. Name the forum and provide a description. You can also add media files such as videos, images, and audio files to the forum description.

  2. Choose your Forum type, clicking the question mark icon for descriptions of each type. 

    1. If you're unsure of which forum type to use, select the default Standard forum for general use.



  1. Next choose the settings you want for your forum. You can click the question mark icon for more information on each setting. 

    1. Availability settings - decide if the forum needs a due date and cut off date. You must click the enable box to turn on these settings.



  1. Attachment and word count - Decide if you want to limit the amount of attachments like files and images a student can add to a forum post. You can also turn the word count feature on. This may be helpful if you want students to keep their responses to a certain length (i.e. 200 words max/response).



  1. Subscription and tracking - Decide if you want students to get notifications from the forum (i.e. when there is a new post, when someone replies to a post etc.). Tracking informs students if they have read all of the posts or not. 



  1. Discussion locking and blocking - Decide if you want the discussion to be locked after a period of inactivity and if you want to limit how many replies a student can post in a specific period of time. 



  1. Whole forum grading and Ratings - Decide if you want to grade the forum and if so, what grading type you want to use. Ratings are related to the scale grading type. 



  1. You can leave the rest of the settings as they are for now. Press “Save and display” to finish. 



  1. You will see your forum displayed.



  1. Here is what a post to a forum looks like. Notice you can reply to the post and decide if you want to reply privately or not. 





Resources

  1. Forum in Moodle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwfpfHTd0Tc 
  2. Forum activity (MoodleDocs): https://docs.moodle.org/401/en/Forum_activity 
  3. Using Forum (MoodleDocs): https://docs.moodle.org/401/en/Using_Forum
  4. Forum FAQ (MoodleDocs): https://docs.moodle.org/401/en/Forum_FAQ
  5. Forum settings (MoodleDocs): https://docs.moodle.org/401/en/Forum_settings 
Last modified: Tuesday, 23 January 2024, 3:25 AM