Moodle Forums

Moodle forums are discussion boards in which students and faculty can post topics and replies. An overview of the Moodle forum activity is available from the Moodle documentation site: https://docs.moodle.org/en/Forum_activity

1 Forum settings
- 1.1 Forum Type
- 1.2 Subscriptions
- 1.3 Grade and Ratings
2 Announcements

Forum settings

Create a Moodle forum by turning editing on and adding the Forum activity. There are several settings to be aware of. The following sections cover the most important settings.

Forum Type

There are a variety of forum types. Clicking on the question mark button next to the Forum type setting shows a brief overview of each. From the Moodle documentation:

Moodle Forum Types

There are five different types of Moodle Forums:

A Single Simple Discussion: A single discussion topic in which everyone can reply to
Each person posts one discussion: Each student can post exactly one new discussion topic, which everyone can then reply to.
Q and A Forum: Students must first post their perspectives before viewing other students’ posts.
Standard Forum Displayed in a Blog-like Format: An open forum where anyone can start a new discussion at anytime, and in which discussion topics are displayed on one page with “Discuss this topic” links.
Standard Forum for General Use (Default): An open forum where anyone can start a new discussion at any time.

Subscriptions

Subscribing to a forum means that you will receive an email every time there is a new post to the forum. Instructors can change the default behavior of subscriptions to a variety of settings. From the Moodle documentation:

Moodle Forum Subscriptions

There are 4 subscription mode options:

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

To see who is subscribed to the forum, enter the forum and click Subscriptions → View subscribers.

Grade and Ratings

It is possible to generate a grade for each student based on their participation in the forum. The grade is derived from a rating for the student's posts and can be calculated in a variety of ways (ask your Academic Technologist for more details).

Announcements

The Announcements forum is a special forum used for class news. Only instructors can post to this forum and everyone is forced to subscribe to this forum.

To remove the Announcements forum from the front page, see Deleting the Announcements Forum

In previous versions of Moodle the Announcements forum was named "News Forum." The function is the same but the name was updated to provide a clearer indication of its purpose.