Creating Discussion Forums

If you are delivering your course either fully or partially online, or even just supplementing a face-to-face course, you may want to use a discussion forum to increase student involvement. Moodle offers four different types of discussion forum. Here are descriptions of each from their website, followed by instructions on how to add forums to your Moodle site.

• A single simple discussion - is just a single topic, all on one page. Useful for short, focussed discussions
• Standard forum for general use - is an open forum where any one 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 - 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. This feature allows equal initial posting opportunity among all students, thus encouraging original and independent thinking

1. Click the Turn Editing On button
2. In a weekly or topical block in the center column, choose Forum from the Add an Activity drop-down menu

   

3. On the New Forum page, give your forum a name and a good description to properly frame the discussion
4. Under the Forum Type drop-down menu, choose one of the forum types outlined above
5. You can decide if you wish to grade the forum so that a numerical score can be added for each student
6. Click the Save and return to course button at the bottom of the page