Forum activity: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 15:30, 2 May 2007

This activity can be the most important – it is here that most discussion takes place. Forums may be structured in different ways, and can include peer rating of each posting. Generally, forum postings may be edited up to 30 minutes after posting. The postings can be viewed in a variety for formats, and can include attachments. By subscribing to a forum, participants will receive copies of each new posting in their email. A teacher can impose subscription on everyone if they want to.

Forums are divided into two main categories:

General forums (found in section 0 of the course)
Learning forums (the forums of the specific parts of the course: they are organized and numbered according to the course sections they appear in).

Forums are organised under following headings:

Forum (the name of the forum)
Description
Discussions (the number of discussions started)
Unread posts (the number of posts you have not read yet)
Track (the 'yes/no' information about your choice whether or not track the unread posts - if your choice is negative, you will find an '-' sign instead of the number of the posts unread)
Subscribed (the 'yes/no' information about your choice whether or not get the posts transferred to your mail box)
RSS (the 'RSS' (Really Simple Syndication) button - please refer to RSS in forums for additional information

General Forum Usage

All students are by default autosubscribed to the general forum. Use it as a questions forum, where you answer questions about Moodle or about the course. Tell all students that before they ask you a question about the course, or Moodle, they should check the questions forum first. That way you don't have to answer the same questions over and over! If a student asks you a new question about the course, or about Moodle, have them enter that question into the questions forum, and answer it there.

Create a training and support Moodle course for your installation, and answer instructor and user questions in the General forum for that course. The forum can become a storage area for troubleshooting topics.

Learning Forum usage

Forums can be used in a number of ways. What you do depends on what type of teaching you are involved in and what you want to achieve.

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 assessment in the Teaching Strategies Forum.

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

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 ==Learning Forum usage==
 Forums can be used in a number of ways. What you do depends on what type of teaching you are involved in and what you want to achieve.
+===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===

Documentation