Forum activity

Teaching Forums When you decide to use a discussion forum as an activity in an e-learning environment it is important to be aware that your time will be needed in some sense in order to make the activity successful. If your goal is to encourage discussion, forums only work if a sense of community and purpose can be fostered amongst participants, however, this sense of community may be fostered by the students themselves, depending on your intentions with the activity.

Whilst one of the great advantages of e-learning is the flexibility it affords participants, this does not mean that days or weeks should pass without response and discussion in a forum (unless it is appropriate for it to do so). This is perhaps most especially true at the beginning of a course or programme when students and tutors are new to each other and in need of welcome messages/encouragement. Whilst e-learning, and discussions in particular, can support learning that is not always tutor/teacher-centred, your role will be important, especially as an online community begins to develop. It is during these initial stages of introductory material that a group of students can become a community of participants who begin to grow in their understandings of course material and individual contributions to the knowledge construction process.

As the discussions progress and learners become accustomed to the mechanics and the tone of the forums then there are key ways in which your input can be reduced, thereby helping to foster a community that is less dependent on the tutor. Even then, however, you will probably want to be a presence in the discussions although you may choose to be one of many contributors rather than the font of all wisdom.

Student Centred Forums

With the growing popularity of social networking software like Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and the like, students are coming to Higher Education with a new technological sophistication and with new expectations for communication. And as universities recognise that reflective and life long learning are significant goals in education, student centered learning and the creation of student centered spaces online are also gaining credence in educational settings. We know that effective learning requires access to social and academic networks for both study material and emotional support. As such, online communities can offer a holistic knowledge construction and support mechanism and recognize that affective activity is effective.

Social forums, often called ‘Virtual Cafes’ or ‘Common Rooms’ can be set up for courses or for programmes, depending on the student need. Such spaces provide a common area for students to come together and discuss unlimited topics, including social activities and educational ideas. They are supportive spaces for students, most successful with large first and second year courses where students would not otherwise have the opportunity to communicate with others outside their own tutorial group. In many departments trialling social forums, students have expressed a greater sense of community within and a sense belonging to a department having had the experience and convenience of the social forum on their course; this could arguably have implications for retention at the first year level.

These spaces are typically highly active, especially in first term. They are usually self monitored by students, who understand that the same ‘rules’ and ‘netiquette’ that apply to them within any University of Glasgow computing space, also apply in Moodle.

The News Forum

Moodle courses automatically generate a News Forum which defaults to automatically subscribe all participants in a course. The name of the News Forum can be changed to something more appropriate, such as ‘Important Announcements’ or the like. This is a useful feature and many departments and faculties are using this forum in a Moodle course to announce exam dates, times or changes to exams, lectures or seminars, as well important information about course work throughout a term.

How do I know which forum is right for my purpose?

Moodle has four kinds of forums:

1. A single simple discussion 2. Standard forum for general use 3. Each person posts one discussion 4. Q And A Forum

Which of the above will best suit your needs for a particular activity? In order to answer this question it is useful to think how you might lead such a discussion in a face-to-face environment. Would you throw the question out to the class and sit back to observe them in their answers? Or would you break them up into smaller groups first and ask them to have discussions with a partner before bringing them back to the main group? Or perhaps you would like to keep them focused on a particular aspect of a question and ensure that they do not wander away from the topic at hand? All of the above approaches are both valid and useful, depending on your learning outcomes, and you can replicate all of them in Moodle forums.

A standard forum for general use is probably most useful for large discussions that you intend to monitor/guide or for social forums that are student led. This does not mean that you need to make a new posting for each reply in each topic although, in order to ensure that discussion does not get 'out of control', you may need to be prepared to spend a significant amount of time finding the common threads amongst the various discussions and weaving them together. Providing overall remarks for particular topics can also be a key aspect of your responsibilities in the discussion. Alternatively, you could ask students to summarize discussion topics at agreed points, once a week or when a thread comes to an agreed conclusion. Such a learner-centred approach may be particularly useful once the online community has been established and, perhaps, when you have modeled the summarizing process.

A single simple discussion is most useful for short/time-limited discussion on a single subject or topic. This kind of forum is very productive if you are interested in keeping students focused on a particular issue.

Each person posts one discussion is most useful when you want to achieve a happy medium between a large discussion and a short and focused discussion. A single discussion topic per person allows students a little more freedom than a single discussion forum, but not as much as a standard forum where each student can create as many topics as they wish. Successful forums of this selection can be active, yet focused, as students are not limited in the number of times they can respond to others within threads.

A Q and A forum is best used when you have a particular question that you wish to have answered. In a Q and A forum, tutors post the question and students respond with possible answers.

Preparing your time

Ask yourself if

1. you wish to have involvement in the forum or if you want the students to lead and own the space
2. you want the forum to add value to the face to face environment or have a life of its own in its own right outside the lecture theatre/classroom or seminar room
3. you are prepared to make appropriate contributions to the discussion in order to:

##encourage discussion if students are quiet
##help shape ideas if students begin to wander off-task
##your role will be defined as discussions/a course progresses 
##you will explicitly but gradually relinquish control of the discussions
##you will encourage and support learners to share control of discussions(for example you might ask a learner/group of learners to summarise contributions to a discussion thread/topic or you might ask learners to initiate discussion topics)

Some forum suggestions to consider

1. If your course is at a distance, if your face to face time is limited, or if you just wish to foster a sense of community in your Moodle course, it is good practice to begin with a welcome or introductory message or thread in one of your forums. This welcome or introduction from you invites participants, for example, to post some specific details to introduce themselves to you and their peers. This can be your icebreaker or you can have an icebreaker separately.

1. If you have two questions for participants to answer, starting the two strands or topics within the forum itself will both help learners to see where to put their responses, and remind them to answer all parts of your question.

1. Remember that you are communicating in an environment that does not have the benefit of verbal tone, eye contact, body language and the like. Careful consideration of your communication is, therefore, necessary.

1. Postings to a forum are always written but they can take different forms and you may wish to consider what form best suits the activity. For instance, you might choose to articulate a form of contribution in order to be explicit. Thus you might say, 'This is a think-aloud forum in which, together, we will try to tease out ideas and possibilities' or 'This is a formal forum in which you are invited to share your ideas on (topic)' and, where you select the latter, you might have already suggested learners plan those ideas offline or in another kind of activity within Moodle.

What it takes to have an active forum

• Many instructors in the humanities find forums particularly useful for facilitating quality thought and interaction among students, while developing language skills.
• The best forums are often forums where students are required to return more than once, read the posts of their peers, and respond to them. To facilitate this kind of forum activity, for academic and adult learners, it is sometimes necessary to create a staggered grading structure and timeline for forum posts, so that, for example, students have to make a first post in response to an instructor, then return at a later date and read the posts of their peers, and respond to those.

Essay plans

Create a forum where only the teacher can start discussions, but the students can only reply. Each thread you start contains an essay question (or several similar ones). The students make a bullet point plan for the essay and post it as a reply.

This works well as a revision strategy as the students can see how others have approached the same task. Once everyone has posted their plan, you can start a discussion as to which plans seem better and why. Creating a scale to use for rating the posts can be useful so that the students can see how helpful other people think their effort were.

Grading forums

• You can use the ratings to grade student activities by restricting ratings to instructors only, and then rating all student posts. But be aware that this reports an average of all ratings for a single student to the gradebook, and not a sum total of the ratings for all posts. So if you want your students to make several posts in one forum, then you may want to use an Assignment module to house the Forum grade for a particular block. That grade will then be reported to the gradebook. Be sure to make it clear to the students that they don't have to do any assignment in that assignment module, and that that's where their forum grade will be housed.

• There are lots of discussions about Forum best use and Forum assessment in the Teaching Strategies Forum http://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=41.

• A useful discussion about Forum assessment can be found here http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=66008.

Teacher forums

A teacher-only forum may be added to a course by creating a hidden forum. Teachers are able to view hidden course activities whereas students cannot.

Prior to Moodle 1.7, each course had a teacher forum, accessible via a link in the course administration block.

See also

• Using Moodle Chapter 4: Using Forums, Chats and Dialogues
• Using Moodle The philosophy underlying "no editing after 30 minutes" forum discussion
• Using Moodle Forum module forum
• Using Moodle Best Practices for grading discussions forum discussion