Title: 6.2 Using Forums
Course: Certificate in Online Education

Creating a forum

Forums are an excellent way of allowing your students to communicate with each other and with you. You may want to have a general forum for your course which allows students to discuss general themes and issues raised in the course content. Or you may wish to gather students opinions on a very specific question you put to them. Moodle even allows students forum posting to be graded, so you could use them as part of their course assessment.

Firstly, let's have a look at how you can create a new forum in Moodle:

As you can see, it's much like creating any other type of activity or resource in Moodle.

Different forum types

A forum is a forum is a forum, or is it? Often what you may have used on the internet before are general discussion, bulletin board type forums, but there are many other types too. Moodle offers you 4 different types that you may want to use, the following is taken from the Moodle online help:

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.

Why not try creating a forum of different types to see what the differences are? The Q and A forum is great for getting students opinions without them being influenced by what others have already written.

Each course is created with a special 'news forum' at the start. This can be used to send course announcements to students, but only teachers have the permissions to post to this forum. So for, example you can use it to inform students of a change of lecture room, or when the exam timetable has been published.

All forums allow file attachments and ratings on the posts, and can be enabled/disabled on the forum settings page. Users can also subscribe to forum postings, which we'll look at on the next page.

Seeding forums and subscriptions

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.

Forum Moderation and Netiquette

Some of your students may not have used online discussion forums regularly, so they may need advice and help on how to use them appropriately. For example, a topic heading or subject like 'hi' or 'help' doesn't give other readers a clear idea what the message is about. Discussions may start to go "off-topic" and you need to guide the discussions back.

Don't feel that you need to respond to every message posted, forums are a good way for students to get peer support. So when a student asks for help on a forum, you may want to respond by asking if any other students know the answer rather than responding directly with the answer yourself.

Unfortunately, in rare cases, you may need to deal with very inappropriate messages. Hopefully this won't happen as your students should be clearly identified in their course and so they are unable to post anonymously. To help prevent this occurring, you can lay down some clear guidelines as to what is and isn't appropriate to post on your forums. These guidelines are often referred to as netiquette (short for "network etiquette" or "Internet etiquette"). You can find more about netiquette at: http://www.albion.com/netiquette/book/index.html. If a student continues to abuse the forums, you may resort to blocking the user from accessing the course site.

Forums are an extemely useful way of communicating with your students, and there are 101 ways of using forums in your course. For example, in a blended course, you may ask students to give their thoughts or opinions in the week leading up to a lecture on a particular subject. In the face to face lecture you already have a good idea of the students level, ideas and possible misconceptions on the topic, allowing you to pitch your lecture at an appropriate level.