Adding a Forum/Discussion Board to your course

To create a forum, make sure editing is turned on, and click the “+Add an activity or resource” button located at the bottom right of each week/topic then select forum from the list. You can select a forum type by expanding the “Forum Type” drop down menu in the General section. The default is “Standard Forum for General Use,” and that works for most scenarios. The Q and A forum type can also be useful. There are a few key differences between this forum and the standard forum. In a Q and A forum, the instructor must post a question first, and then in order to see their fellow classmates’ responses, students must first post their own response. This is a good way to ensure that students are posting original content. One detail to keep in mind with the Q and A forum is there is a 30 minute delay between the time a student posts their work and when they can see other student’s work.

By default, students are allowed to upload files to their forum entries, and the default file size settings will work for most moderate-sized uploads (like documents and images). If you want to prohibit students from uploading files, expand the “Attachments and Word Count” section, and make sure “Uploads are not allowed” is NOT selected. If you need to expand the file size limit on uploads, you can do that in this section as well, but you should consider contacting your Instructional Technologist to see if there is a more appropriate tool to use for your envisioned activity.

There are a variety of other settings that allow you to specify response windows and cut-off times. You can even post audio files to discussions. Full documentation on the Moodle options for this tool can be found at this link: https://docs.moodle.org/30/en/Forum_settings.