In each course room there is a forum for “announcements”.
Every participant of a course is obligatory registered in this forum. You can use this forum to send binding announcements about the course to all course participants (but it does not replace official notices).

Students will receive postings to their university email address.
Students cannot reply to postings.

You can set up general forums for mutual exchange, e.g. about technical topics or organizational matters. (If you do not need the forum “Announcements”, you can hide it: Edit > Hide/eye icon).

In the general forum topics can be discussed independent of location and time.

The ability to read and reply to posts at your leisure is very convenient for some learning types. Forums can be subscribed to and posts can be received bundled as email, more about this in the settings below.
In addition to forums, you can send messages directly to students. More on this in Sending messages.

As a “teacher” you can set up a forum.

1. Switch on the edit mode in the upper right corner: Click on the cogwheel and “Turn on editing”. Go to “Add material or activity”, a dialog box will open.
2. Select the option “Forum “, the forum form will open.
3. Fill in the fields, see also the following notes or accept the default values:

Forum name (required): Name is a link on the course page
Description: What is this forum about? who is to discuss here?
Diplay description on course page: As it says
Forum type: Standard forum for general use (recommended, everyone can start a discussion or reply)

Maximum attachment size: Set the maximum size for a single file to be attached.
Maximum numer of attachments: Set the maximum number of files that can be attached.

Subscription
In the subscriber forum members get all contributions by email sent to the university address. Bundled if desired, see below, “Setting up forums (reception and display)”.
As a course owner, you can determine whether students receive posts “mandatorily” or can subscribe voluntarily. If voluntary, you determine whether students are already subscribed to the forum upon course entry (“Automatic”) or subscribe themselves (“Optional”).

Forum tracking
New posts can be marked by the system.

For all other entries the “Default values” can be used, if not desired otherwise.

To show and edit the current subscribers of a forum tick the actionmenue of the forum and chose “Show/edit current subscribers”.
“Teachers”can edit subcribers.

Users can configure their forum settings (email digest type), e.g. single mails or daily mails) an the highlighting of new messages (forum tracking).

Set up forums preferences in your profile under > preferences > forum preferences.

A forum can be set up so that students can rate other forum posts.
For example, they can signal their agreement or mark posts as particularly helpful.

1. Call up/click on the forum.
2. Open the forum settings with the cogwheel: Change rights” section.
3. The page “Rights for forum: …” is opened. Now add the rights for students (For the display in the field “Filter” enter the following: “forum:viesa”):

• forum:rate Rate posts
• forum:viewanyrating see overall rating
• forum:viewallratings See all partial ratings (by name). (This option should be communicated to participants).

4. Click on the “plus” icon, click on the role “Student”
5. The role “Student” is now displayed in the column “Roles with rights”.

Now select a suitable rating in the settings, section “Ratings”, e.g. of the type “Scale”, “Helpful or not (e.g. forum posts)”.

• Example in the course room "What is possible with Moodle" - "Forum with rating of contributions by students"
• Moodle FAQ (moodle.org) - "How can students rate forum posts?"

More information: Documentation at moodle.org