Certificate in Online Education

To encourage students to post to the forums, it's often a good idea to 'seed' the forum with a question or opinion for students to respond to. Students may be wary about being the first to post to an empty forum.

When students reply to a forum or ask a question, it's good practice to respond quickly, as this can encourage the discussion to continue. To help with this, Moodle offers the ability to subscribe to forums, so you can get an email message every time someone posts a message, rather than you needing the check the forum regularly for new messages.

Forum subscriptions can be enabled when you first create the forum:


Or you can update the subscriptions later either from the forums settings page, or from the top right of the forum display page:



A good idea is to force everyone to be subscribed initially, so students will automatically get new message notifications, but they have the option to unsubscribe if they want to.

The forum subscriptions are one reason why it's important that all teachers and students have valid email addresses on their profiles, otherwise they could miss important messages.