Moodle Tutorials: Participating in Discussion Forums

How to Use Discussion Boards

A forum is a way to have online discussions or share information with your instructor and classmates.

Posting a new topic to a forum:

1. Go to the course that has the forum you wish to access.

2. Select the Forum that you wish to add a discussion to then scroll down to Add a new discussion topic button at the bottom of the forum.

 

a. Give the topic a name in the Subject field.

 

 

b. Type your post in the Message section.

 

 

c. You can also upload a file to the forum.

 

 

d. Check your post for errors then click the Post to forum button at the bottom. You will have 30 minutes to edit your post after posting.

 

3. Be sure to change the Subscription setting to reflect your preference:

 

a. If you want to receive emails of every post to the forum, check the box next to Discussion subscription.

 

b. If not, uncheck the box.

 

 

 

 

 

c. Some instructors may have set the forum to force you to be subscribed or to not allow you to be subscribed, so these previous options will not appear.

Replying to a forum topic or question:

1. Click the name of the topic in the forum.

 

2. Click the Reply link at the bottom right of the post to which you want to reply.

3. Type your post in the Message section.

4. You can change whether you're subscribed to a given forum at any time by clicking the name of the forum, then clicking the Subscribe/Unsubscribe me from this forum link at the top right of the window.

 

Some instructors may enable the Groups feature to divide forum participants into separate groups. If you want to see the forum posts for a particular group, select the group name from the drop-down menu that will appear on the forum's page. Depending on how the instructor configured the forum, you may be able to see only posts made by members of your group.