How does a discussion forum work?
Discussions make it easy for students to collaborate and communicate. To do this, you create a discussion forum for a course, where students can discuss one or more topics.
A forum can have multiple topics, just like a course can have multiple forums. Integrate the discussion into your course by adding it to the content.
You can have all your students discuss one topic, or put them in groups and share ideas with each other. Starting a discussion works the same in both cases:
- First you create a forum,
- Then add one (or more) topics to it. A topic is the place where students can post and read messages.
- Within the topic you (or the students themselves) create one or more threads : main messages to which others can respond with an answer.
- A student can post an answer as well as create a thread.
As a teacher (discussion moderator) you can edit and delete all student threads and answers. You can also subscribe to forums, topics and/or threads to receive notifications of new replies.
Creating a forum
- Navigate to Course Tools in your course's navigation bar.
- Click Discussions.
- Click New and then New Forum.
- Give your forum a title.
- Do you want to immediately create a topic with the same name? Then click 'create a new topic with the same title in this forum'.
- Add a description of the forum (and/or video or link) in the html-editor.
- Under 'options' select:
- Allow anonymous posts if you want to allow anonymous posts. Students will then not see a name with a message. NB: messages posted anonymously are only anonymous for students, not for you as a discussion moderator!
- Users must start a thread before reading and replying to other threads in each topic if each student must post before reading other people's posts or commenting;
- A moderator must approve individual posts before they appear in the forum if you want to approve posts before they become visible;
- Show forum description in topics if you want the forum description to be visible in every topic. NB: you can also add your own description to the subject (create subject).
- Click 'Save & Close' to return to the Discussions homepage or click Save & Add Topic to create a topic.
- You can also add Restrictions (start date, end date, group restriction, release conditions).