Forum Activity (Discussions)

Forums can also be referred to as discussion forums, threads, discussions and similar. They are a way to have students post text, images, videos, or attached files that you want other students to see and/or interact with.

Adding a New Activity

All Moodle shells come with an Announcements forum you can use for class-wide announcements. New forums can be created to behave in a number of ways, if you want to encourage unique responses that students can later see the other responses for you might consider creating a Q and A forum. As well, forums can made for multiple, separate groups.

Grading

Forums in Moodle support rating individual posts with points earned and/or looking at a student’s interaction across the Whole Forum and grading that.

Or you can bypass these entirely and instead do manual entry of grades into the gradebook.

Resources to Share with Students

If students are getting too many emails from forums we have steps for managing those forum subscription emails. We also have some basic steps for teaching students how to post to a forum and advanced instructions for getting the most out of the Atto text editor when they post.

Troubleshooting

You might see two instances of a forum in your Moodle gradebook, a Whole forum and a Rating version, if this is not your intent  you can edit the forum in question and set the unwanted grading method (Ratings OR Whole Forum Grading) to Grade Type: None.

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