Forums can help engage students by providing a place for asynchronous discussion outside of class time. By turning on the Forum Ratings feature, an instructor can also provide grades to students based on the quality or quantity of their participation in the forums.
To create a Forum:
- Log in to the CLE and go to the CLE course where you would like to add the Forum
- At the top-right of the CLE, turn Edit mode on.
- Inside the course section where the Forum should be displayed, click the Add an activity or resource link.
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In the window that appears, select the Forum resource type. This will take you to the settings page for the new Forum.
- Enter a Name for your Forum. The text entered here will be the link students will click on to enter the Forum.
- Enter a Description; this is a good place to enter information about which topics you would like students to discuss in this particular forum. The description will be displayed to students after they click to enter the activity; you can also choose to display it on the front page of your course by checking the box
- Select a Forum type from the drop-down menu:
- A single simple discussion: A single topic discussion developed on one page, which is useful for short, focused discussions (cannot be used with separate groups)
- Each person posts one discussion: Each person can post exactly one new discussion topic (everyone can reply to them); 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.
- Q and A Forum: Instead of initiating discussions, participants pose a question in the initial post of a discussion. Students may reply with an answer, but they will not see the replies of other Students to the question in that discussion until they have themselves replied to the same discussion.
- Standard forum displayed in a blog-like format: An open forum where anyone can start a new discussion at any time, and in which discussion topics are displayed on one page with "Discuss this topic" links
- 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
- Click Save and display or Save and return to course.
Availability
Click the enable button next to the Due date and next to the Cut-off date to set dates for these settings. Enabling a Due date will display a date in the calendar for students to know when their discussion is due, though students will still be allowed to post in the forum unless a Cut-off date is enabled.
Attachments and word count
An Instructor can adjust the maximum attachment size and the maximum number of attachments allowed on an individual post within a forum. The 500KB default attachment limit will accommodate most file types; however, if users are attaching large files (such as video files) to their forum posts, this limit can be increased up to the current file upload limit. Alternatively, an Instructor can use this drop-down to prevent students from attaching files to their forum posts.
Subscription and tracking
Users within a course are given the option to subscribe to a forum and receive all posts made to that forum by email. Instructors can change this behavior in the Subscription and tracking section using the Subscription mode drop-down menu.
Read-tracking allows a user to quickly see whether there are new posts inside a Forum that they have not yet read. By default, this is set to Optional, which means the system will respect the preferences in each user’s Moodle profile. Instructors can use this option to force read-tracking on or off for all users in a course, regardless of how their individual preferences are configured.
Discussion locking
Discussions may be automatically locked after a specified time has elapsed since the latest reply.
Post threshold for blocking
Students can be blocked from posting more than a given number of posts in a given time period.
Turnitin Plagiarism Plugin setting
Enable Turnitin Plugin for Forums in a CLE Course Turnitin is seamlessly integrated with the Forum activity in the CLE. Instructors can use the Turnitin plugin to assess the originality of students' forum posts.
Whole forum grading
Select either scale or point as the type of grading to use for this forum.
Ratings
By turning on the Forum Ratings feature, an instructor can also provide grades to students based on the quality or quantity of their participation in the forums.
By default, only those with elevated privileges in a course can provide ratings to student postings; if you would like to use the rating system for a peer-evaluation activity, in which students can rate other students’ postings, please connect with your category manager for information.
First, select an aggregation method from the Aggregate type drop-down menu. This controls how ratings are translated into a grade for each student. Next, select the Scale you would like to use for this forum; this determines what options you’ll see when giving a rating to a student’s post.
Common Module Settings:
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- Visible
Set whether or not an activity is visible to students. By default, new activities are set to Show. (This is comparable to using the Hide/show icon for the activity on your course page.) -
ID number
Setting an ID number identifies the activity for grade calculation purposes. - Group mode and Grouping
Create Groups and Groupings in a CLE Course These options let you restrict the activity to particular groups of students you have already created in your course.
- Visible
Restrict Access
To add restrictions on accessing the activity, click Add Restriction. The Add restriction window will open, containing the following options:
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- Date - Prevent access until (or from) a specified date and time.
- Grade - Require students to achieve a specified grade.
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Group - If you have groups in your course, you will see the following additional options:
- Group - Allow only students who belong to a specified group or all groups.
- Grouping - Allow only students who belong to a group within a specified grouping.
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- User profile - Control access based on fields within the student’s profile.
- Restriction set - Add a set of nested restrictions to apply complex logic.
- Mobile app - Require students to access (or not access) using the Mobile app.
If you have groups in your course, you will see the following additional options:
- Group - Allow only students who belong to a specified group or all groups.
- Grouping - Allow only students who belong to a group within a specified grouping.
Activity completion
- Do not indicate activity completion: There is no option to mark the forum as complete, manually or otherwise.
- Students can manually mark the activity as completed: Students have the option to mark the activity as complete without any requirements being met.
- Show activity as complete when conditions are met: The optional conditions are: require view, require grade, require posts, require discussions, require replies, and expect completed on (date).
Tags
- Tags are used to connect content from various activities within courses. Learn more about the tagging feature here.
Participants can usually choose whether or not they want to be subscribed to each forum. However, the teacher can choose to force subscription on a particular forum then all course users will be subscribed automatically, even those that enroll at a later time. There are two ways to do this to set up the Forced subscription:
One:
- Open the CLE (courses.ucsf.edu), and go to the course that you would like to set up the subscription mode for forum activities.
- Navigate to the forum activity that you want to set up the subscription mode, and click the forum name to open the forum editing page.
- On the forum editing page, click on the Settings tab in the Secondary navigation bar.
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Scroll down to the Subscription and tracking, and select one of the following options:
- Optional subscription (default) – to let participants choose whether to be subscribed to that particular forum. This is a recommended setting because it allows students to opt in and follow particular forums when they choose to.
- Forced subscription – to force subscriptions to that forum for everyone. Individual students cannot override this setting.
- Auto subscription - to force subscriptions for everyone but allow individuals to unsubscribe at any time.
- Subscription disabled –to prevent anyone from subscribing to the forum.
- The preference of the Subscription mode will be saved automatically in the CLE course.
Two:
- Click on the Subscriptions navigation bar on the Forum's page
- Click the drop-down menu next to Subscription mode on the right-hand side of the forum page.
- Choose a Forced subscription.
- This setting will be saved automatically.
For more information, please check the Forum Setting -> 1.2 Forum Subscriptions.