Forums are a discussion tool that allows instructors and students to post and reply to each other's saved messages within their Moodle course. Through email subscriptions, students can also receive emails containing content posted to the discussion forums of their Moodle courses.
You can use discussion forums for a wide variety of learning activities such as:
A simple single discussion: A forum that only one discussion thread.
Use case: Students share a summary of a course reading or activity.
Each person posts one discussion: Each student can create their own discussion thread and others can respond to it.
Use case: Students share their own perspective of a course reading or activity and give feedback to others.
Q&A forum: A forum with two steps to use. The forum needs to be created and then the instructions must post a question. Students will reply to the question posted and students can only see answers posted by other students 30 minutes after they have submitted their own answer.
Use case: Instructor wants to assess individual student understanding about course materials.
Standard forum displayed in a blog-like format: Students can view everyone's posts and responses in one place.
Use case: Collect questions for a class speaker.
Standard forum for general use: The default forum type. Each student can create and reply to as many threads as they would like to create.
Use case: Students provide an example or analysis of material from a course reading or activity.
Moodle Forums have subscription options that will automatically send an email to a Brandeis email address.
The following options are available for all forums:
Note: You can also change the subscription mode via the "Subscription and Tracking" section of the forum's administration settings page.
Read Tracking is an option for automatically marking a forum post as "read" or "unread" so students can keep track of posts.
The following options are available for all forums: