Creating forums

Download PDF guide for - Creating forums

A useful tool found in Moodle that allows asynchronous communication.

Use

The forum has a variety of different uses depending on the type of forum you use and how you decide to set it up. It can be used simply as a communication tool (general forum) or for revision/assessment (QandA forum).

1. Go to front page of your course that you want to add the web link to. click the Gear icon. ‌
2.  Click Turn editing on.
3. Go to the topic that you want add the forum activity to and click the Add an activity or resource link located at the bottom right hand of the topic.
4. Choose Forum from the ‘Add an activity or resource’ pop up list.
5. On the forum page click the expand all link.
6. Fill in the Name and Description Field. Description field introduces your user to the purpose of the forum.
7. Choose your ‘Forum type’. Options are:

• A single simple discussion - a single topic discussion developed on one page, which is useful for short focussed discussion.
• Standard Forum for general use - an open forum where anyone can start a new topic at any time; this is the best general
• Each person posts one discussion - each person can post exactly one new discussion topic (everyone can reply to them though); this is useful when you want each student to start a discussion about, say, their reflections on the week's topic, and everyone else responds to these.
• Q And A Forum - The Q & A forum requires students to post their perspectives before viewing other students' postings. After the initial posting, students can view and respond to others' postings. This feature allows equal initial posting opportunity among all students, thus encouraging original and independent thinking.
• Standard Forum displayed in a blog - like format. This is just another way of displaying the discussion threads in a Standard Forum. The first post is displayed in full with replies accessed by a link.

7. Decide if you want to allow attachments to be added to posts and the quantity and size allowed.
8. Decide on the subscription settings. This determines weather emails of posts are sent out once a post is made to the forum.  This is NOT a replacement for users checking forums and should not be relied on as a robust method of communication.
9. Save your changes at the foot of the page

• Optional subscription - Participants can choose whether to be subscribed
• Forced subscription - Everyone is subscribed and cannot unsubscribe
• Auto subscription - Everyone is subscribed initially but can choose to unsubscribe at any time
• Subscription disabled - Subscriptions are not allowed

Using Forum with Groups

If you are using the group function in Moodle you can use this with Forum.  As the member of staff in the course you will be able to see and participate in all of the discussions regardless of settings.

You have 3 options

• No groups – all users can participate freely in the forum (this is the default.
• Separate groups – each group can only see and participate in discussions within their own group.
• Visible groups – groups can see other groups discussions but can only take part in their own. 

This Moodle guide was created by LEADS and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.