Moodle 3.8 - 20 Forum | What is a Forum in Moodle
Moodle 3.8 - 20 Forum | What is a Forum in Moodle
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, turn the editing on 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 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 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
learness 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.
To get started on our forum now,we just
need to scroll down and 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, pinning a post to
the top or setting 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 on a different course, we can see some other settings. Forum discussions may be ordered in various ways for instance by last post.
From the three dots on the right ,a teacher can unpin a discussion or pin a
new one. Everyone can star a discussion from the three dots or by clicking on
the star and for students, this will move the discussion up the list under any
pinned posts.
Teachers can send private replies to students which only the student can read
but not reply to, and teachers can manually lock
discussions from the three dots on the right. Here we see the message telling
everyone they can no longer reply and they can easily subscribe or unsubscribe to each discussion.
Finally,if you want to test a new way to view forum discussions, you can access this from the user menu then go to Preferences, then go to Forum preferences and then Experimental nested discussion view
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