 Okay, hello everyone and welcome to our very first Moodle Academy webinar and the topic for this month is make the most of Moodle forums and we have about an hour, we want to make this very interactive so we hope that you will join in in the comments in the chat asking questions and giving your thoughts. So speaking to you is myself, I am Mary Cooch, I'm Education Manager at Moodle and I'm coming to you from a surprisingly sunny north of England in the UK and I have with me Anna if you'd like to say something. Yes, I'm Anna and I'm Anna Cressa and I am the MSc coordinator and I just want to welcome you and thank you for being here in the first webinar of the Moodle Academy. That's great, okay now what I always like to do when we start a particular session is before we say what we are going to discuss I'd like to cover what we are not going to discuss actually to be absolutely clear here so this is an intermediate webinar about forums so we're not going to discuss the basics on turning on the editing and how to set up a forum and the different forum settings there are plenty of YouTube videos and courses and documentation out there instead what we are going to discuss about is how to and I'm reading here initiate promote encourage optimize monitor moderate facilitate make the most of a forum so we're looking at this from a pedagogical a good practice point of view if you like and I would encourage you after this webinar to go into the course which is attached to this and do the activities there and get a facilitating forum badge so those last two verbs there moderate and facilitate they're often used interchangeably and in fact in our webinar we're going to talk and cover both but if you want a specific definition or how they differ and how they're similar in Moodle well moderating from a Moodle point of view a forum moderator and this is often someone with an editing teacher role in a course they have the permissions to edit a poster after the time is up for example for a student a learner they can split posts and move them if they go off topic they could delete something which is inappropriate and they have the right to send a private reply to a learner learners can't send private replies to each other they can't actually reply to a private reply but this is a useful feature for a forum moderator often the course leader or an editing teacher it's a bit like a police officer role if you like policing the forum whereas a forum facilitator and this is often the same person and he's often the person with editing teacher rights doesn't have to be though but they have a nurturing role or a more caring role of trying to engage the participants to encourage them motivate them to discuss and continue discussing going more depth and keep them on topic so that's really how I would see those two roles but we're going to look at both during this session so assuming then we've decided we are going to set up a forum in our course and what are the benefits of a forum over for example a video conference or Moodle chat or messaging or something even outside of Moodle and although we are not going to look specifically at the mechanics and the basics of setting up a forum it might be worth just reminding ourselves of the different types so that we can discover which we like and the benefits and advantages and drawbacks of all of them now for me personally one reason the top reason why I'm a big fan of forums is the fact that they give you time to think they are asynchronous you don't have to as you do in a live session or a live chat you don't have to immediately think and type your answer you can reflect upon it and you can come back with come with a more considered answer after a few hours or a day or whenever and for some people who perhaps lack confidence or whose language or writing skills aren't as confident that's very useful talking about writing of course in a forum with for instance the atto editor you don't only have to type your answer you can you have the option to record a video or to record audio as your forum contribution and of course in the great spirit of Moodle and social constructionism you can use forums as a great way of building your community especially at the start of a course or the start of a seminar you've got forum search but you can search you can reference you can add a permalink and other way other reasons that are not immediately obvious one of my favorites for example is for a simple way of doing peer review now Moodle's workshop activity is very powerful and that's the official way of doing peer assessment but it's also very complex and yet with a simple forum each person can start a discussion and share something they've created or written and others can respond reply and comment on it you could even add ratings very straightforward and this idea of peer support again a forum works very well with that where a group can help each other or it might be that in your particular specialism or situation you have to just use a forum for giving information as in the announcements forum and I'd be interested to know when we start our discussion in a short while how many of you find the announcements forum very useful and how many of you actually as I've done often in the past just don't have it in your course at all it depends doesn't it what we have here are the types the standard types of forum I've under I've put announcements at the bottom because of course it is a forum but it's not one where students or learners respond it's mainly for the teacher to give news or information if you don't do anything at all in your Moodle course when you set up a forum you will get the standard forum for general use which is fine because that's exactly what it is it allows anyone to start discussions and reply to discussions however if you think your learners might be might risk going off topic or they need to be focused you could use the single simple discussion forum where you the course leader the teacher can ask a question and all they can do is reply to it they can't start their own forum discussion posts this is very good I found because I taught nearly 30 years in a high school for younger students who could go off topic but you do have to be careful with this because the layout or the navigation as you see it on the course page can sometimes be quite strange or confusing depending on where the participants choose to reply or which which comment they reply to and also how you've chosen to have the forum displayed if we're allowed to have a favorite forum I have to say my favorite is the each person posts one discussion because it very much allows people to take ownership of one discussion post which for example they could use in a peer assessment task to share something that they've done or to share a link and then others can reply and so each person has their own little forum area I do know that the Q&A forum which I don't use a lot but many people find that popular please do share the types of forum that you use and which you like the Q&A forum is great if you want to avoid people simply participants simply copying from what other people have said because a learner has to respond themselves to what the teacher or facilitator has put before they can see the responses of others and again there are some drawbacks with that and depending on how you like to see your forums in a course there's also the standard forum displayed in a blog like format so you see a little summary of each one on the course page so what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to pass over to Anna Anna if you'd like to share your thoughts on a forum and also tell us a bit about what people have been commenting in the chat yes absolutely well I'll give some time to everybody to write their thoughts about form say what form types you use in the forums in the chat and I'll start by saying two examples the first example of good use of forum this is the announcements forum very common it's always there and I must say that we often I used to use it in a corporate environment where the courses were in a weekly format and we used to use those announcements forum to give the pace of the course so we were creating one course to summarize the week that passed and inform learners about the new subject of the next week and the tasks and everything I have to say though that if you're going to use announcements forum like this you have to be careful don't overdo because learners seem to be quite negatively reacting to many multiple announcements forum remember that announcements forums can clutter easily the inbox and also the posts need to be small not too long because learners don't seem to read long long texts especially when it's an international audience and as you said I have another favorite forum the one different from yours is the question and answers and I love this forum because it can really be very useful when it is to use it for assessment so for example I remember once we had a course it was English for business and we had adult learners working not being using English as a second language and we had an activity where they had to rewrite a passage to simplify it in plain English and Q&A was just the perfect tool because it allowed them original submissions rewriting the passage and also easy grading and at the very end bonus points they could see each other submission that was really really nice now let me see what are what is everybody writing the forum we have okay um Peter says that single simple discussion is very useful in a blended course where you can set a topic where students can react to it in the online time you get back to the input in your next class session very nice idea Alex says that mostly standard forum it's the one he prefers him mostly standard forum and each person post one discussion forum I can see that your favorite wins here mostly use standard forum but students not use very often I use Moodling a company I understand perhaps it's more self-paced courses uh says Robert and Sam says that uh I use announcements to push information to all participants and for assignments I use single forum and for general discussion I stick with the general discussion forum uh Peter says that standard forum with option to upload documents for pre-review brain idea yeah uh Rita says okay hello Rita no worries um um Peter says everyone post one discussion maybe for everyone to introduce themselves great idea yeah Alex uh we have our set to send all announcements messages to students at 5 p.m every day so announcements would be a great way for us to send urgent messages yes yeah setting it is nice to avoid getting a million messages throughout the day though yes that's a clever idea indeed um Caroline Kana is great for question problem of the week post towards students so they're working and solution yes another one for you then Anna isn't it that's your thing yeah okay um I think we'll move on um and if we obviously Anna we can discuss them more later we're going to look now since we've decided we're definitely going to use a forum in our course and we've decided which types we're going to use we're going to move on to uh discussing code of conduct now obviously um we'd like to think that everyone has a code of conduct if not for the forum specifically then for your whole course and perhaps your code of conduct is something that has been uh implemented by your organization or maybe you've designed it yourself and students have to agree to it or maybe as happens with some people um you get your participants at the start of your course or your your semester your your year to agree between yourselves what the code of conduct is and then you write it out draft it and they agree to it spare by having more of a sense of ownership of this code of conduct would be very interesting also to know what is the content what kind of things do you think are important to keep or to include in one I have an example for you it's it's not um typical in that this is the moodle.org code of conduct forums code of conduct and of course moodle.org is a global site with courses with forums in many different languages so it's relevant to us but one point that I would like to make further down in this code of conduct extract and the link will be in the course as well is choose an informative subject line and I think that perhaps should be in all similar codes of conduct because say for instance you have a forum where you encourage your learners to ask questions there's nothing worse than a post which comes up as help in capital letters or even urgent help you know which is not only a bit annoying but also it doesn't give any indication as to what the problem is and it's much easier especially if you have a lot to go through and be able to see what it is the specific problem is so in a minute we're going to discuss that and I'm asking going to ask you for your thoughts but before we do I'd just like to have a little poll here to do with codes of conduct and I'd like you just very quickly when I set when I launch this do you actually assuming you have a code of conduct do you agree it's with your course participants or do you use a pre-existing one maybe one that your organisation has done or do you not have a code of conduct that's fine it is anonymous so please do tell us what your answers are I'll just wait a minute and then we'll see what we get okay interesting I will reveal the responses shortly we'll just wait a few more moments to get more participation here so who discusses and agrees one of course it might not be possible to do that even if you want to depending on the institution where you're working and maybe you haven't thought of using a code of conduct or you can trust your learners implicitly already perhaps we we shall see okay I'm just going to wait another moment it's actually quite interesting how the percentages are divided up here okay right so hopefully if I just share the results now please tell me if you can actually see these can you see these results can you see them Anna yes yeah so that's very interesting it is actually kind of similarly divided isn't it between agreeing one using a pre-existing one or actually not having a code of conduct that's very interesting so bearing that in mind then let's go back here and I'm going to pass over to Anna again and maybe we can discuss that and have your thoughts and the thoughts of our webinar participants on codes of conduct well you see I think things are mixed in other courses in particularly in corporate environments I rarely see a code of conduct being set up just for the forum discussions of a course usually it is a wider corporate general code that applies to all the courses and of course the forum as well but on the contrary in school courses particularly in small ages like primary school where teachers want to train young students to online communication and prevent flames and cyberbullying incidents this in this case we usually see teachers to invest time on training students about net ticket and setting up a common common together one net ticket for the forums and let's see okay peter is John says that yes I have a code of conduct and peter says that it's looking for the code of conduct for from mood lorg and thank you for passing it right and Alex says that I deal mostly with adults I trust them yeah this is typical no need to have a conduct code but I'm sure it may be very useful sometimes indeed some says that I mean learning and design department in a work learning and development department sorry in a workplace and we make a deliberate policy not to be viewed as too controlling it's hot enough getting them to enroll on courses that's true yeah bit love says that for mature students it is implied for younger students it should be explicitly reading I think I agree that's also my experience and don't say that we use uh similar to mood lorg but with additions so exist to provide a safe and friendly place for members to learn and socialize we encourage freedom of speech but we expect our members to treat others with respect and courtesy uh don't write something that you won't be prepared to say to someone respect confidentiality say within the legal framework and be aware that safeguarding libelings lander cooperating and data protection law supply but language profanity is not permitted any form of prejudice is not permitted and you should be mindful at all times that the motorsport UK regulation and UK law continue to be applicable in the online environment so true John thank you for the details Caroline says that I guess we assume adults know how to behave but perhaps the point about informative titles or other points about the content is important in code of content for adults rather than the behavior parts I agree actually I wanted to make that point when it was first mentioned Anna that um I'm not sure we can assume that adults don't need a code of conduct because it's not only about how to behave and how to be polite it is things like oh John's just John's reading my mind there it is indeed it is it is also to do with um neticut in terms of writing informative subject lines or even things like uh writing in full sentences instead of using SMS text or WhatsApp abbreviations I was in a uh moodle course for my masters and that was part of the code of conduct please write in in in like official English this was because our forums were were graded as part of our masters and don't just write as you would send a message to your your your your brother or your sister on a text for instance so interesting thank you for that let's let us assume then that we've got our forum set up and our learners have agreed to the code of conduct so it's the first day of a new course or the first day of a new semester or a new new induction for our company do you have any activities for breaking the ice um for example breaking the ice meaning activities which can make people feel comfortable in a new environment and this might be a new environment in a new course even if it's a blended course and they might see each other in a face-to-face environment as well so do you have such activities how do you do it if you feel that you that you need it in your particular courses i'm going to give you two uh examples that that we've used and then pass it over for your ideas um so one thing that we did uh last year that uh it's not our idea a lot of people do it but it works really well we let we run Helen Foster who's also here and I we run the learn-boodle basic smook twice a year for people completely new to Moodle around the world now last year we had a special edition which actually lasted three months because the whole world was locked down and of course many people had to to use the phrase we use in English pivot online to online learning using Moodle and um we had the idea of asking people to share the view from their window so um they could see uh so we get some great photos of different seasons according to where you were in the world what hemisphere we had a lot of pets there's someone's cat in the middle there of course people weren't obliged to do this and if they didn't have a window they could share the view from their basement um what was on the wall and notice board or so on and um it worked really well for that as I mentioned at the beginning social community aspect of Moodle building a community within the forums there and that was very nice also easy to take a picture with your um with your smartphone and added another activity which I I've done in courses and in fact we did this in Moodle HQ a while ago it doesn't only have to be when you're with people who you've not met before you can also do this with people you know um just to get things started and that is the two truths and a lie activity or game if you like and this is where my favorite forum of each person post one discussion topic works very well because each course participant adds a new discussion topic with three statements one of which is a lie and after a certain period of time um you can then tell them they all try to guess and then you tell them which one was the lie and this is quite fun but also allows people to get to know each other to get to know them better if they did if they already knew them before and of course you as the the course leader the forum facilitator you should join in as well with three statements about you but what I just want to emphasize here and this activity this icebreaker activity is a good example there is that it doesn't have to be typed in text you can see there the atto editor in Moodle where if you don't want to as our student mark here you don't want to type you can record yourself in a little video or you can record audio instead so you've got the universal design universal design for learning aspect of different ways of expressing yourself there you you have the choice and so just a couple of my thoughts there but I'm going to ask you Anna what's your experience of icebreakers when they're needed and let's see what people in the chat have got to say as well well as you said Mary the most common icebreaker is they introduce yourself but can be enhanced with a photo or something special about yourself what you like what's your preferred coffee your favorite dessert and little things like that are very powerful because this way learners can really correlate to each other and this is a good beginning one not not very common icebreaker I've seen is the serving of five songs of different styles and learners were had to pick one song and express why justify why this is their favorite and why they picked that one that was you know it was a indirect way of meeting each other it was really interesting and you can do this with songs or other kind of artworks or travel destinations one thing that a bit concerned me when we use icebreakers not to overdo with icebreakers so I often like to use as a last question in an icebreaker to ask a learners expectations about the course so after we teach about all the things I would like a line that will help them return the focus yeah that's great bring the focus back I like that yeah um let's see what we have in the top because we do have several uh messages here Alex said oh could I just say before we start Anna at the end of our little discussion about code of conduct um Richard popped up and said avoid Iranian sarcasm and I did want to say that publicly that's a very good point because it's not only in terms of the code of conduct and people discussing you know in it's in all aspects of using a forum not only because of course it's polite but you may well have course participants whose first language is not the same as your first language and they they won't necessarily understand your sense of humor or your cultural irony or sarcasm and so if we are facilitating forums of any types that is something that we should bear in mind including icebreakers which I'm going to pass over to you again Anna to look at what people have said I did a very important comment uh well Alex says about the icebreakers that uh video session is the best icebreaker and Robert says that in most case we have a kickoff session video conference session where we practice small talk for 10 20 minutes this is very powerful indeed uh some say that I haven't used yet icebreakers because all my people know each other however I always recommend that icebreakers should only be used if they are directly related to the course topic notice what some may consider uh gym gimmicks gimmicks yes gimmicks right uh Caroline says that uh speed a friend friending a session with breakout rooms in a video conference with a directed question for a live icebreaker for a synchronous forum so weeks are great but the questions needs to be directed for example uh what famous person would you like to have dinner with why are you starting this course rather than back tell us about you I totally agree with this it also helps uh if the facilitator kicks off by posting their own that's very good point Caroline um some say that I think sometimes icebreaker put people off it might have the opposite effect that intended yes we need to be careful with icebreaker I agree with that also Caroline also agrees with Sam's comment and Robert says that once I did uh ugly cup challenge very good where every participant have to sew up in the video with a really ugly coffee cup and I remember that was uh used in the global mood mood as well it was really funny competition but what if you don't have any ugly cups that's the thing isn't it you know would you have to go and buy one so interesting I was very desperate to find something to be honest uh Jessica says that I find icebreakers important as it's good to understand a little more about fellow learners even when it's not related to the course no worries Sam's uh I'm Greek so my English are weak at some points about the work of gimmicks uh no worries leader says that I guess usually to introduce himself in the forum with some questions to inspire them during an online live session I would ask them to tell something new not course topic related last book what would you do within one million euro usually works very well great I already know what I would do with one million euro because I often lie in bed at night thinking planning it out how to divide it all up but it's not going to happen so anyway thanks Anna so let's assume then we're in our forum they've signed the code of conduct the ice is broken so they're starting the discussions they're starting posting and the next thing I want to discuss is something that's very close to my heart for a couple of reasons actually and that is if you are the if you are the course facilitator moderator if it's your course so you have to respond in forums do you have a set time within which you promise to respond for example 12 12 hours 24 hours or are you the person like me which is actually quite a bad habit you're so keen and enthusiastic you go and jump in immediately and answer all the questions that are posed or do you have a preference whereby your course participants help each other and respond and the time is very very important because again from my own personal experience if you have courses where people are welcome to ask an answer amongst themselves in the spirit of Moodle then if one person even if it's with the best of intentions answers all the questions immediately they get the notification you are kind of robbing other people of the chance to reply aren't you when they would like to have helped sometimes this happens in our learn Moodle basics MOOC again with the best of intentions we have expert Moodlers who are again with their enthusiasm they will immediately reply and other people then don't get a chance to reply and from my point of view as a language speaker I also think this is important the last few years I've tried to answer questions because I can't get enough Moodle questions on Moodle.org so as well as the English speaking forums I try to answer in the French German and Russian forums now the French ones are fine I'm okay at French but in the German and the Russian forums when I read a question I understand what it is and most often I know what the answer is but it takes me a few minutes to craft the response in my head or maybe check it on Google to make sure my grammar won't embarrass me and it has happened that in the 10 minutes it's taken me to make sure my answer is grammatically correct the forum moderator or someone else are regular as reply and I think oh I've I could have answered and I've lost my chance so I do think you have to get a good balance with the response time between not answering immediately but also not neglecting things for ages and ages maybe your organisation has a specific time when I did my masters for instance we were told that to expect a response if we had a query in a forum within I think it was 24 hours so within a working day so what do you think about this Anna what's your preferred method and what do our webinar participants think well as you said it depends on the type of forum I mean if it's a forum to solve questions the answer should be fast like within 24 or 48 hours depending the environment and this is it is important as we said to declare that this learners in advance so they are aware of that on the other hand if the forum is like a collaborative task between learners and the speed of social constructivism then teachers should leave some space to learners to interact with each other and again if the forum is created for reflection I'm not sure it will have to be responded at all perhaps we can just a back and respect everyone's contributions so what do you think everyone let's see means I say yeah I have to believe that anybody answers before me oh yeah yeah well they do in the German and the Russian so just just beware if you're in those but yeah okay and some say that it depends on the course I always let them know what to expect from me I usually promise to respond within 24 hours however I will sometime tell them that I will let the conversation run and only intervene if an answer with a legal repeat question is wrong but I'll try to get them to discuss why and I can totally understand this and Alex says that I used to monitor my forums and I said just twice a day in morning and evening I think that's fast as well yeah I guess also there's the idea and we started a discussion a forum discussion in this in the course itself actually and I encourage you to go and look at that afterwards about what is your subscription preferred subscription method for forums too do you have as I do a post or an email or notification about every forum post you subscribe to or do you have the daily digest do you have auto subscription do you force people to subscribe which I wouldn't have thought many people do unless it's essential an essential part of the course but it's worth thinking about and please add your comments if not here then in the course later we have moved on now as you can see we we've moved on from the response time we've decided an optimum response time we're allowing our participants to respond as well and our forum is going fairly well but occasionally it gets a little bit quiet or a little bit stuck and we in our facilitator role here of nurturing we need to try to encourage the discussions to move on we need some of them to be a little bit more profound to get more detail so let's think about how we can do this the kind of language we need to use and also whether we need some kind of extrinsic or external hooks to get them to post more such as ratings or gamification so I'll just give you a few thoughts of mine and then I'll open it up now I personally I'm a big fan of sandwiches I know this looks like a burger but it's the best I could find for a sandwich and this comes from again many years as a high school teacher having to speak to parents who would come to ask about the progress of their child when their child was perhaps a slightly more challenging than average child and so you would also always try to give your feedback and this applies to if you're giving feedback in a forum by offering something positive first of all thank you for your thank you for your thoughts very interesting put the constructive criticism in the middle the thing you want them to improve on and then finishing off again with something positive the the sandwich method if you like I do appreciate however that this is a cultural thing and in some cultures the belief is it's far better to be direct rather than to couch your requests for improvement or your corrections within something nice and sweet and kind but it's a thought it's a discussion point and while we're talking about language in order to get the discussions further to get them to elaborate something more open-ended and simple yes no questions so what do you think about this a why question what is your experience question so these kinds of things making them think to get them to come back and give you more detailed or longer responses particularly if you're running a course where there is some element of assessment or grading of the forums which is a little bit of a plug actually for a webinar and I will be doing later this year on assessment and forums is one of those and of course what if you have a very forum running very nicely with a nice community atmosphere but they go off topic how can you bring them back without having to split the forum you know let's get back to returning to and so on and then finally do you think it's necessary or do you actually do this yourself to encourage participation to use things like ratings rate of forum post even if it is and this is what we have on Moodle useful just one rating useful which either you the teacher the forum facilitate to do yourself or you enable ratings for the learners and they can rate each other and what about gamification what about a badge is it a good idea to award a badge for for participation in a forum you might think it is we certainly do in our learn Moodle MOOC but doesn't that mean that you might have someone who simply writes hi a one word participant one word post and they get automatically awarded a badge is that worth it well I will stop and move on to Anna what do you think and let us know in the chat well Linda post a question here about an idea that Greg mentioned so I'm going to explain this a little bit you see in courses that are based on social constructivism the cultivation of community essential and form is just the perfect tool for this and in a course like that in a corporate environment we had an international audience I've seen forums to be used as a task and there was a requirement for participants to make one new discussion answering specific questions and then they had to reply to other to their peers giving a meaningful reply and that was several years back when we didn't have that advanced rating in Moodle in Moodle forums and the facilitator was rating the basic discussion up to in a scale to zero eight and the maximum score that could someone get was eight and was also giving one point to each of the meaningful replies so this way someone could gain up to 10 points within a forum and I must say that although that participants were chasing for the grade and they were contributing to gain the way the grade the result was really positive because at the very end they were getting into the mood to reply and start collaborating with others and do meaningful replies not just well done I agree with you that was not accepted so this is the concept now that we have the advanced grading Linda in Moodle forums we can do this we can review per user all the forum posts that has done give them a grade and also give them a feedback for their contribution that's what was Greg saying and let's see what others say um some say that ratings definitely yes I think participants appreciate A the feedback and B which discussions are popular I would like to have a better way in Moodle of using ratings for more resources and activities than those currently available I think it's a good bite the grading the grading Alex says that badges are cool but you have to be very careful with it more badges available less motivation to obtain just one more indeed uh interesting question from Greg are ratings feedback sort of a type yeah I would say sort of but if you consider to give ratings using custom scale for example well done this is great excellent work or something like that and instead of using a scale uh a point scale to do your feedback then you can do an actual feedback with ratings I read just says that I found forum ratings cumbersome how to set up the Moodle Swiss Army knife effect yeah everything is possible but it may not be so easy to set up uh really I well it depends I did the facility facility who's facilitating actually yeah uh some uh now says to Greg I agree that the quality of the feedback is more akin to popularity but it may encourage engagement indeed and Alex says that I provide them with an example and the rubric so they know what to expect I they heavily give feedback on their first post and I were off from too much feedback as the course continues I would love the option to do partial points less zero five in ratings for partial grade ready I think that's uh yeah possible with the rubric as you did just give 0.5 for a level and okay thank you well we're coming near the end now and interestingly our forum has been going very well we had our icebreaker we've been doing the best nurturing we can but unfortunately as often happens in life despite our best efforts we have some problems and so our last thing to think about here is how do we deal with problems such as from the the fairly minor going off topic do you gently bring them back with certain phrases or are you the ruthless type who would split it and move it what about the big problem of the internet itself really flaming deliberately posting things to annoy people or cause controversy and disputes how do you handle that if you have that as a problem and of course this might not be an issue if your course or your site isn't open but what about spam if you do have open courses um I'll just share with you another link from Moodle.org again this is uh really available in our developer docs we have many moderators we have a lot of people in the different courses who help us on Moodle.org and so we have moderated guidelines feel free to read hours where we talk about how we deal with spam or how we deal with flaming or personal attacks so do you yourself do you actually prefer to take a subtle approach are you the gentle person who would send that little private message uh or would you um as I've been informed where this happens would you immediately suspend someone would you have some kind of punishment for them this happened to me and I was so upset that I actually left that forum and I never went back again so I'm going to launch our final poll please would you let me know you yourself do you prefer a for a subtle gentle a gentle approach in forum moderation do you prefer the tough approach or and I suspect we might get a lot of these does it really depend you cannot say one or the other it depends on the situation on the course on the individual participant I'll just give a moment for people to respond and then I will share the results with you okay interesting I'm just gonna I can see the results and uh quite interesting what we have yep I think I think let's see so let me share them and Anna this is what we have here so if you'd like to comment on them and then so we've got half say it depends and then the other halfish subtle or tough more subtle than tough I would say okay fair enough fair enough and so we're going to finish then in our last little discussion here about you Anna how do you feel about moderation problems and let me ask the rest of you in the webinar chat in our final five minutes well I would say it depends yeah I would say that is true yeah that's really true but I think I'm more careful tough approach uh see what I want from forums and what I believe it's essential for the good of the class is to have clear forums uh and for example sometimes icebreaker can go a long way and instead of adding value to the class feeling and the community they might start disturbing learners and uh disorienting them in such case I'll like to step in and say thank you for your contributions that will be really interesting we have moved on so I'm locking the discussion that's enough and I let people to move on sometimes I think you have to step a foot on it and um or um let's see what we have in forums I'd like to say that uh in the chat I'd like to say that I teach teenagers and it's better to have a private discussion shows not to embarrass anyone absolutely yes very important um some say it's rudeness I will tackle the individuals involved privately great yes um I don't have another uh input from uh Richard uh Richard says that one of our most common problems is about language what languages are permitted if some use minority languages others will feel excluded if some insist on dominant languages others will be under valid language policy is he indeed absolutely Richard yeah absolutely yeah thank you very much for for raising that I think in such cases perhaps uh it would be nice to have separate groups inside forums for different languages um sometimes it would work yeah yeah okay um thank you very much everyone we're actually coming up to the hour and coming to the end of our webinar now and so we very much appreciated your input just to say before we stop and before we stop the recording that um please do go to the make the most of Moodle forums course and join in the activities there claim your badge please if you haven't already also do sign up for the other webinars Anna will be running the next couple and uh they're on assessment including something to do with forums and thank you for being part of the launch of the very first Moodle Academy webinar thank you very much thank you all