Communicate and collaborate with forums guide

• Open the Forum from your module homepage.
• Forums are organised into Discussions which have one or more messages. To start a new discussion or to add a question to a Q and A forum, select the Add discussion topic button.

1. Give your topic a Subject.
2.  Write and format your Message. You can embed multimedia if required.
3. Select Post to forum to post the topic. You will have 30 minutes to edit the post before it is emailed to students and staff who are subscribed to your Forum.
   •  If you want to send an immediate notification select Advanced and check the box alongside Send forum post notifications with no editing-time delay.
   • Students can use a daily digest to reduce the number of Forum emails that they receive from Moodle. This means that they may not receive the notification when it is sent. 
   • Select the Pinned box to keep the discussion at the top of the forum.

• Select the link to Advanced to display other options:
  • Attachment: Attach a file by dragging and dropping or browsing your computer.
  • Pinned: Pin the discussion so it appears at the top of the forum.
  • Send forum post notifications with no editing-time delay: Send the forum notification immediately.
  • Display period: Lecturers have the option of setting a display period for a discussion. This defines the period when a discussion is displayed on the Forum, with a Display start and Display end time and date. The Enable box must be ticked in order to activate these settings.

• Open the Forum from your module homepage.
• Select the relevant group from the drop-down menu. 
• If you select to post a message to All participants, students will not be able to reply to your message.
• Selecting All participants from the group drop-down menu is a great way of sending an announcement to all of the groups. Make a note in your posts that replies are not allowed.

If you have a message that is relevant to all groups on your Forum, select the Advanced button to open additional settings.

Check the box alongside Post a copy to all groups.

Scroll down the page and select Post to forum.

After posting a discussion, you will be returned to the Forum page. From this page, you can:

• review discussions and replies,  
• favourite discussions,
• change your subscription on individual discussions,
• search for a keyword in a discussion to find relevant posts and
• Select the Add discussion topic button.

• You can edit or delete your own discussions and replies using the options in the bottom left corner of each discussion/reply. 
  • If 30 minutes has elapsed since you posted your discussion, or if you selected to post your message with no time-delay, a notification will have been sent to students' emails with the text of your original discussion. Any edits you make will not be emailed to students as notifications.