The Forum allows academics to create a space for students to engage in online discussions and collaborate with one another.
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?
Creating a Forum
Academics can create a forum by clicking the "Add an activity/resource" button and selecting "Forum".
Click 'Get Started' to view the step-by-step guide.
Forum Settings
The Forum offers extensive settings to change how it behaves. The default forum is good for general use where staff and students can post any number of posts.
There are 5 types of forums that facilitate different types of interaction between staff and students.
- Standard forum for general use: The most common forum where participants can create new topics and reply to existing ones.
- Standard forum displayed in a blog-like format: Displays like a blog and participants can create new topics and reply to existing ones.
- A single simple discussion: A one-topic discussion forum where the first post is the forum description.
- Each person posts one discussion: A forum where each participant can create one discussion topic, and everyone else can reply.
- Q and A Forum: Only staff can post questions. Students must reply to a question and wait 30 minutes before they can see other students' responses to the question.
Click 'Get Started' to view the step-by-step guide.
Make a Post
Teaching staff can make posts in all forums (general forums and Announcement forums), but students can only post in general forums.
Click 'Get Started' to view the step-by-step guide.
Grade a Forum
Academics can enable grading in the forum. Once enabled, the grade page will show academics all posts made by each student and allow marking.
Click 'Get Started' to view the step-by-step guide.
Once grading has been enabled in the activity settings, there are several grading methods available to mark student posts.
Click 'Get Started' to view the step-by-step guide.
Manage a Forum
After setting up the forum, academics can use the forum management features to view student progress and manage preferences.
View Student participation
The ‘Report’ section within the forum administration bar provides an overview of student participation in the forum. Staff can also export posts made by participants within this section.
Click 'Get Started' to view the step-by-step guide.
Export Discussions
Academics can export forum posts into common file types such as .csv.
Click 'Get Started' to view the step-by-step guide.
Manage Subscribers
Forum subscription allows staff and students to receive email notifications whenever a new post is added to a forum.
Academics can manually add or remove subscribers on the subscriptions page of the forum.
Click 'Get Started' to view the step-by-step guide.
Forum Preferences
Individual forum preferences are available on the Moodle preferences page. These preferences can be used to change the frequency of forum emails and update forum tracking details.
Create Group Forum
Forums can be set up in group mode to provide separate discussion areas for each group. Group members accessing a forum can only see posts and discussions from within their group and post to group members.
Click 'Get Started' to view the step-by-step guide.
Why are students unable to post in the forum?
The most likely reason is that the forum is an Announcements forum i.e. a special forum for news and general announcements which is automatically created for each course, and which by default only teachers and administrators can post in.
To create a standard forum in which students can post, turn editing on for the course, click the 'Add an activity or resource' link and then choose Forum.
Students may also be unable to post to a forum where a Group Mode other than 'No Groups' has been used but the student is not a member of any group in the course. They will see the message "Adding discussions to this forum requires group membership". In this case, either add the student to a group or change the Group Mode to 'No Groups'. 'Group mode' can be found in Forum 'Settings', in the 'Common module settings' section.
Why student's posts don't appear in forum?
In the Q&A forum there is a 30-minute delay after making a post, before other responses are revealed. This is to account for the 30 minutes after posting where students can edit and change their own posts.