NC12873 (17393): Forum

Forum

Forums are places within a learnonline course that facilitate two-way discussion between you and your students, and among your students.

An Announcement is automatically created for each course, and displays at the top of the course home page. Place general news and announcements relating to the course in this forum.

You can also create 5 different types of discussion forum within your course—see What kind of forum do you need?

If you are using a forum for summative assessment, bear in mind:

The system will not allow students to request extensions on summative forums
Students will see their mark, not their grade for forums

Adding a Forum

On the course homepage, Turn editing on.
Click 'Add an activity or resource' in the section of your course where you want the forum to be displayed.
Select the Forum option from the activities list.
Click Add which is located at the bottom of the 'Add an activity or resource' box.
If your forum is intended to be a summative assessment, choose the relevant assessment from the list populated through Course Outline.
Otherwise check the 'Formative or non-assessed activity' box.
Click Proceed to settings.
Name your forum and describe it's purpose to assist students.
Choose your forum type, see What kind of forum do you need? for more information.
Forum - Attachments and word count
- This setting allows you to choose the largest size of file that can be attached to a forum post, or to disallow attachments.
- This setting allows you to choose the maximum number of files that can be attached to a forum post.
- This setting allows you to choose whether the word count of each post should be displayed or not.
Forum - Subscription and tracking
- When a student is subscribed to a forum it means they will receive forum post notifications via email. There are 4 subscription options.
  - Optional subscription - Students can choose whether to be subscribed
  - Forced subscription - Everyone is subscribed and cannot unsubscribe
  - Auto subscription - Everyone is subscribed initially but can choose to unsubscribe at any time
  - Subscription disabled - Subscriptions are not allowed
- Read tracking enables students to easily check which posts they have not yet seen by highlighting any new posts. If set to optional, students can choose whether to turn tracking on or off.
Forum - RSS
- If you want to enable an RSS feed for this activity, select either Discussions or Posts to be included in the feed.
- Select the Number of RSS recent articles (either discussions or posts) to include in the RSS feed. Between 5 and 20 is generally acceptable.
Forum - Discussion locking
Discussions may be automatically locked after a specified time has elapsed since the last reply.
Post threshold for blocking
Students can be blocked from posting more than a given number of posts in a given time period.
Ratings

Ratings are how you grade forums. The Aggregate type allows you to choose how ratings are combined to form the final grade in the gradebook. You can also restrict the ratings to be for student posts within a specific date range.
The options to combine the ratings are:
- Average of ratings - The mean of all ratings
- Count of ratings - The number of rated items becomes the final grade
  Note: the total cannot exceed the maximum grade for the activity
- Maximum - The highest rating becomes the final grade
- Minimum - The smallest rating becomes the final grade
- Sum - All ratings are added together. Note that the total cannot exceed the maximum grade for the activity
- If "No ratings" is selected, then the activity will not appear in the gradebook
Other settings