News Forum
Forums are where discussions take place. In Moodle II, we’ll cover only the NEWS FORUM. The other forums will be covered in a workshop called “Communication Tools”.
The news forum is a special forum that is automatically created for each course and for the front page of the site, and is a place for general announcements. The default settings of this forum are as follows:
- By default, only instructors may add news or reply to news.
- By default, everyone is forced to be subscribed to the news forum.
The Latest News block displays recent discussions from the news forum. A course may only have one news forum.
To enable your course’s News Forum , you need to:
1. In Course settings set "News items to show" to a number greater than 0.
2. Turn editing on, click on “Add block…” and select the Latest news block.
To remove the News forum , you need to:
1. Delete the news forum from the course homepage
2. In Course settings set "News items to show" to 0
3. Delete the Latest news block
Changing the settings of the News Forum
In case you need to change the settings of the News Forum, click on Turn Editing on then click on the editing pen next to the News Forum. You are now in the Forum settings.
Forum name: The title of this Forum.
Forum type: it is locked to News Forum
Forum introduction: An introduction to the Forum that describes the topics that are going to be discussed.
Force everyone to be subscribed : If Yes then the posts will be sent to the student as an email.
Read tracking for this forum: If On then users can track read and unread messages in forums and discussions. The instructor can choose to force a tracking type on a forum using this setting or choose Optional and leave it to the students to decide.
Maximum attachment size: allows you to limit the size of any attachment that students may want to upload in this forum.
Allow posts to be rated? Allows you as instructor to rate the postings by your students in the Forum activity, also you can let your students to rate their colleagues.
3 new items to manage postings are added. Their concept is very simple.
- Post threshold for warning: Put here a number. When students reach the number of postings you specify here, they'll be warned that they are approaching the threshold. Putting the warning threshold to 0 will disable warnings.
- Post threshold for blocking: Students will be blocked from posting after a given number of posts in a given period, and as they approach that number. Setting the block threshold to 0 will disable blocking.
If blocking is disabled, warnings will automatically be disabled.
- Time period for blocking: Keeping it “Don’t block” will disable blocking and warnings.
Group mode: If you decided to divide your class into groups you will have different options:
- No groups - there are no sub groups, everyone is part of one big community (default)
- Separate groups - each group can only see their own group, others are invisible
- Visible groups - each group works in their own group, but can also see other groups
Visible to students: select Show to let your students view the assignment, Hide to hide it. You can hide or reveal your assignment or any other activity from the eye icon outside beside the link name on the course homepage.
Adding topics
Once a Forum is created, you can add to it discussion topics. In the forum click on Add a new topic (See picture below) and you will be taken to a page where you type your message and then post it.
