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Forums are similar to Caucus. They allow students and teachers to post comments in a central place to simulate (and stimulate) discussion. All Moodle courses automatically come with a News forum which cannot be removed, and all course participants will receive email whenever anything is added to that particular forum. However, you can add new forums as well.

• With editing on, click on Add An Activity and choose Forum.

• Give your forum a name, and a description if you want.

• There are four forum types to choose from:
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  • Single simple discussion - is just a single topic, so all posts will be on one page. No additional topics can be added under a single simple discussion. Useful for short, focussed discussions.
  • Standard forum for general use - any one can start a new topic, and there can be as many topics under the discussion name (for instance, if you want to discuss a certain book that the class read, there can be a topic for discussing the historical accuracy, another topic for the characters, and a topic for discussing the author’s style). This style forum is more open and is more often used.
  • Each person posts one discussion - Each person can post exactly one new discussion topic (everyone can reply to them though). This style can be used when you want students to come up with one question or topic in response to the homework, and want others to respond 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. Q&A forums are a really effective way to make sure that students are actually doing the reading, and are not just replying to the comments already made in an effort to look like they did the readings.

• Subscription in Moodle Forums means receiving emails. If someone is subscribed, they will receive an email with every new post. If you want to make sure students read the forum posts, forcing subscription may be handy (though there is still no guarantee that students will read their email). It is best to choose one of the yes options, since many students don’t know they have the option to subscribe or not. Even if a student is not subscribed, they can still read the forums and post to them.

• If you want to grade forum participation with Moodle Gradebook, you can now rate forums privately.  In the Grade section, you can choose how to grade your students on their posts with the Aggregate Type, pick a grading scale, and choose whether you want to only grade posts made within a certain time frame.  Note that the scale Satisfactory gives 100/100 for Outstanding, 50/100 when you choose Satisfactory, and 0/100 for Not Satisfactory.  By default, students are also allowed to rate forum posts, but you can change this setting.  For more information on preventing students from rating forum posts, go here.
  The possible aggregations types (grading methods) are as follows:
  • Average (default): The mean of all the ratings given to posts in that forum. This is especially useful with peer grading when there are a lot of ratings being made.
  • Count: The number of rated posts becomes the final grade. This is useful when the number of posts is important. Note that the total can not exceed the maximum grade allowed for the forum.
  • Max: The highest rating is returned as the final grade. This method is useful for emphasizing the best work from participants, allowing them to post one high-quality post as well as a number of more casual responses to others.
  • Min: The smallest rating is returned as the final grade. This method promotes a culture of high quality for all posts.
  • Sum: All the ratings for a particular user are added together. Note that the total is not allowed to exceed the maximum grade for the forum.

• Post threshold limits the amount of posts over a certain period from each person.

• Save changes

Your discussion will now be set up, and you can access it from the main course page. However, you will probably want to start a topic first, which you can do from the page that Moodle takes you to after you click on Save Changes.

• Click Add a New Discussion Topic.

• Type the subject, and then what you want to post.

• If you chose to allow subsciption to be changed, you can change your subscription on this page any time you are posting to the forum.

• If you want to add an attachment, you can Browse for one on your computer.
• To send out the email with your new post soon, check the Mail Now box (“now” is a relative term; the email may not be sent for a bit).

Whenever you want to reply to a comment, go into the discussion topic, and then click the reply button under the post to which you wish to reply. You may reply to any post, not just the most recent.