Adding activities (assignment, chat, blog, forum, etc.)

Forum

The Forum is an asynchronous communication tool, which means that participants do not have to be logged in on the portal at the same time to use it for communication. Messages are stored in order that participants visiting the forum can see and reply to them any time.

We can create several forums in Moodle at the portal level as well as at the course level. Students then can create topics and post comment replies to a topic. After sending comments they appear immediately on the portal and students subscribed to the forum will recieve them in email within 30 minutes. During this 30 minutes a student can change and correct their own comment if so desired.

The News Forum is a special type of forum which defaults to automatically subscribing all participants in a course. Comments in the News forum can be set to appear on the main screen.

To create a forum select Forum from the activity list. Give a name to the forum than choose its type. Forum types can be the followings:

A single simple discussion

We can start a single topic discussion. Every student can answer it (and reply to others answers of course) but they can not initiate a new topic.

Questions - Answers

Everybody can initiate any number of new topics and can reply to others comments.

Each person posts one new topic

Each student can post exactly one new topic.

There are a number of subscription schemes. Should every student be subscried to all forums?

No

The student can decide whether she/he wants to be sent email copies of the comments

Yes, forever

All course users will be subscribed automatically and they will not be able to unsubscribe themselves

Yes, initially

All course users will be subscribed initially but they can unsubscribe

We can allow students to rate each others’ posts on a Likert scale. Grades may have numerical values, or words/phrases from a scale system. This i covered in more detail in the chapter of Grading students.

We can also set the maximum size attachment and the number of comments allowed in a certain time period.