In the Discussions settings you can choose, among other things, how topics and replies are displayed, how you want to rate the answers by default and whether you automatically follow your own threads. These settings mainly affect the way you see Discussions.
- Navigate to Course Tools in your course's navbar.
- Click Discussions. You land on the Discussions homepage.
- Click Settings.
- Under Personal settings you can change the following:
- View settings: Check whether you want to always see an overview of your discussion forums and topics, on the left side of the screen when you click on a topic or thread (Always show the discussions list pane) and whether you want to see deleted replies when you search in discussion topics (Display deleted posts);
- Standard view: Select whether you see the titles of discussion publications below each other, after which you click open the publication itself (Grid view) or whether you see all publications completely below each other (Reading view);
- Reply settings: check whether you quote the publication you are replying to in the answer;
- Subscription settings: check whether you automatically follow threads that you create yourself.
- Under Organizational Unit Settings, select whether discussion participants can rate publications by stars or by up voting/down voting:
- No ratings: no one can rate.
- Five-star rating scheme: participants can rate the discussion publications on a scale of one to five.
- Rating scheme for higher/lower scores: discussion participants can rate publications up or down.
- Assessment scheme with only higher scores: discussion participants can only upgrade publications.
- Under Availability Condition Defaults settings you can determine the visibility before the start date and/or after the end date.
- Under Grid view settings, select what information you see in the grid:
- Check Topic descriptions if you want to see a short description of the subject. NB: this is visible to all participants!
- Under Default threading style, select 'Threaded' if you want to see all publications under a thread together. Select 'Unthreaded' if you want to see all publications in chronological order.
- Check Show the preview pane if you want messages you click to open in the bottom half of your screen (rather than in a pop-up).
- Check Show the search bar if you want to display a search bar that you can use to search for publications.
- Check Publication ID to display the Publication ID.
- Check Organization Defined ID to display the ID of the publication's author.
- Check Limit the number of subject characters to be displayed in the publication if you do not want long titles of publications to be displayed in full. Enter the number of characters you see in the grid in the input field.
- Click 'Save' to save your changes and return to the Discussions homepage.
The Default Grading Schedule setting becomes the default setting when you create a new topic. You can always override this setting when creating a new topic.