By default each course site in Moodle has a General News and Announcements forum. Additional forums can be added to a course site to promote engagement and interactivity.

Types of forums

The news forum is a special forum that is automatically created for each course and for the front page of the site and is a place for general announcements. You can only have one news forum per course.

The "Latest news" block will display recent discussions from this special forum (even if you rename it). For this reason the forum will be automatically recreated by Moodle if you are using the Latest News block.

When you add a new forum, you must choose one of four different types:

  • 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 Teachers (only) 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.

Subscriptions

Under "Force everyone to be subscribed", you can make the forum act like a list server, such that posting a message automatically sends an email to everyone who is subscribed.

Users can edit their profile to receive forum posts as they are made or as a complete or subjects digest each day. In their profile settings, users can also control auto-subscription to forums and forum tracking. Changes made to the profile are user settings and will be in effect for all course sites in Moodle.

Grading forum posts

Forums may also be used as graded assignments. In order to add grades to posts, you should locate the "Allow posts to be rated?:" section of the forum settings and check Use ratings. Select a Grade scale for this assignment.

Once a student makes a post to the forum, a drop down will appear on the post making it easy to assign a grade.