User Guides

Creating a Forum

Note: Forums allow staff and students to relay information back and forth to each other within the same course. This tool is great for feedback and discussion topics alike.

Forum Type:

A single simple discussion - A single topic discussion developed on one page, which is useful for short focused discussions

Standard forum for general use - An open forum where anyone can start a new topic at any time; this is the best general-purpose forum

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 - Instead of initiating discussions participants pose a question in the initial post of a discussion. Students may reply with an answer, but they will not see the replies of other Students to the question in that discussion until they have themselves replied to the same discussion.

Standard forum displayed in a blog-like format

To create a forum:

1. Turn on the editing on the upper right hand side or from course settings.

2. Go to the relevant section where you want the Forum to be available.

3.  Select Add an Activity.  From the dropdown list, select Forum to load the Adding a new Forum screen.

4. General Settings

5. Post threshold for blocking settings

6. Grade Settings

7. Ratings Settings

8. Leave Common module settings as default.

9. Click Save and return to course.

10. A link to your forum should appear in place. Click the link to the forum activity. The forum page will open with the description you provided.

11. Click Add a new discussion topic. Enter a subject and a message.

12. Click Post to forum.

13. Click Continue to return to the forum page. Your discussion topic will be listed, students will now be able to reply.

14. Once replied have been made, click the link to the topic to view replies or add additional replies to the thread.