Moodle forums are a great place to have asynchronous class discussions, but they do require more time for students to complete than participating in a traditional classroom discussion. It’s better for instructors to ask students to respond to 2-3 of their peers’ forum posts rather than everyone’s forum post.

In order to create a Forum in your course, first enter Edit mode using the toggle in the top right corner of your course page. Once you're in editing mode, go to the section where you want the Forum discussion and click on the button that says Add an activity or resource. This brings up a window listing all of the activities or resources you can add to your course. Clicking the "i" information button below each item also gives you a detailed description. Click on Forum. This takes you to the forum settings page.

Here you can give your forum a name, and a description. If you check the Display Description on course page box, your assignment description will be visible to students on the course page.

Forum Type

The Forum Type drop down menu allows you to select the kind of forum you wish to create. See Moodle's official documentation on how to choose a forum type.

Standard Forum for General Use: Students will see an introduction to the forum above the discussions and they can add a new discussion topic. This forum type is great for general discussion about a very broad topic, as it allows students to create multiple posts within the forum about whatever they want. This would be more difficult to check the participation of each student, and would be better to use purely for the students’ benefit.

A single simple discussion: Teachers can post in the forum but students can only reply, they can't start a new topic of discussion. Note that your description must include the question or topic you wish to discuss. Welcome threads are perfect for this forum type. This is useful in keeping a focused, class-wide discussion where each student’s response does not need to be hidden from anyone else before posting.

Question and Answer Forum: By default, this forum requires students to post their perspectives before viewing the posts of other students. This type of forum requires the instructor to create a discussion topic first by clicking "add a new question" at the bottom left. Once posted, students can view the discussion topic and click "reply" to post their response. After doing so, they will be able to see responses from their fellow classmates. Something for instructors to keep in mind with Q and A forums is that student A can respond to instructor’s post, but will not see Student B’s response until after 30 minutes (due to editing time). This can cause confusion and additional work time for students who are required to respond to their peers’s responses. To avoid any confusion and unanticipated work time, we recommend including a "post by" date and a "respond by" date in your instructions.

Each person posts one discussion: Very similar to Standard forum for general use. Each student can post exactly one new discussion topic, which everyone can then reply to. This forum type would be good for when students are posting their own work to be critiqued. A student would create a thread for their work (the forum itself would be in the main unit attached to the assignment) and each of their peers could be required to post feedback for the student.

Standard Forum Displayed in Blog-like Format: Similar to Standard Forum for General Use, but the first post of each discussion is displayed, as in a blog, so that users can read it and then choose to respond by clicking, "Discuss this topic" button.

Attachments & Word Count

Attachments and Word count allows you to set a limit to the size of the attachments that student can include in their discussion. If Display Word Count is enabled then the number of words in forum posts will be shown at the bottom of each post.

Forum Subscriptions

Participants subscribed to the forum will receive notifications (depending on their messaging setting preferences) of each new posting. Note that forum notifications are sent about 30 minutes after each post was saved.

Forced Subscription: This ensures that everyone in the course is subscribed to the forum and can view and participate

Optional Subscription: Allows the users to choose whether they wish to subscribe to the forum or not.

Subscription Disabled: This prevents students from subscribing to a forum, teachers or co-instructors can subscribe to this forum.

Teachers can quickly change the mode via the 'Subscription mode' options by turning on editing and changing the Subscription Type in the Forum Settings page.

Finishing Up

Once you are done choosing your settings, click Save and Display. This takes you to your forum. You can add a new discussion topic by clicking on the Add a new discussion topic button depending on the type of forum you chose.

If you created a Question and Answer Forum, remember that you need to post an initial question before your students can use the forum to reply.