Forum settings

Note for Contributors
This page should explain what can be seen on the moodlesite.com/course/mod.php page
when adding a forum

When creating or editing a forum activity, you will have to fill in the following data:

Forum name

A short name of the forum (e.g. "Favourite colour"). This will be displayed on the course's homepage.

Forum type

For now, there are three forum types to choose from:

A single simple discussion - a single topic discussion developed on one page, which is useful for short, focussed discussions

Standard forum for general use - an open forum where anyone 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

Forum introduction

Type the description of the forum here. Include precise instructions for students regarding the subject of the forum and, if necessary, the grading criteria.

Can a student post to this forum?

This option allows you to restrict students from posting new content in this forum.

For most forums you will want to leave students unrestricted, for which you should choose the first option (Discussions and replies are allowed). Thus, you will choose to allow them to start new discussion topics (threads), and also to post replies within those threads.

Sometimes, however, you will want to disable this ability. For example, this is useful for the News forum when you only want teachers to post new items that appear on the course main page. In this case you might choose the third option No discussions, no replies.

Sometimes you might want to only allow teachers to start new discussions, but still allow students to reply within those threads (for example within the news forum on the site home page). In this case you would choose the second option, No discussions, but replies are allowed.

Read tracking for this forum?

This setting allows you to choose how the choices will be displayed to the participants: horizontally, or vertically.

Hint: In most cases, if there are only a few choices with little text, they may be positioned horizontally. However, if there are more than 5-6 choices or if the text of the choices is longer than 2-3 words, it should be better to display them vertically.

Maximum attachment size

This setting determines whether (and when) the students will be able to view the results of the choice activity. They may:

• never see the results of the choice
• see the results only after they have given the answer themselves
• see the results only after the closing date of the choice
• always see the results

Allow posts to be rated?

If the choice results are shown to students, this setting determines whether the results will be anonymous.

Group mode

This sets the group mode of the choice activity to one of the following three:

• no groups
• separate groups
• visible groups

Visible to students

You can hide the activity from students by selecting "Hide" here. It is useful if you wouldn't like to make the activity available immediately.