 Forum – Start discussions Being able to discuss our learning with others helps us to progress, and Moodle offers several different types of discussion forums for you as a teacher to enable your learners to do exactly that. To add a forum, click the Turn editing on link from the gear menu top right, then in the section you'd like to add the forum, click Add an activity or resource. We can add several forums of several different types, we don't only have to choose one. Clicking Add an activity or resource brings up the activity chooser. Forum is an activity because students interact with it on the Moodle course, and we can add a forum by clicking the button once, and then clicking Add at the bottom, or by clicking the button twice. There are a lot of settings for the forum, but we only really need to give it a name, a description, and then to save it. The name will be what the learners see on the course, and the description, if you wish, may be displayed by ticking the display description on course page box. We then choose the type of forum we want. The default is a standard forum which allows anyone to click a button to add a new discussion topic. However, if you click the drop-down box there are other types as well. For instance, a single simple discussion allows for the teacher to start a topic and all the learners can do is respond to that particular topic. If you want to know what the other forum types are, then clicking the question mark you see the help and you can find out more. There are other settings which might be worth exploring. For example, you can decide the number and size of attachments that you wish to allow your learners to attach, and you can set a word count which learners will see when they add a forum post. Another important element is subscription. Do you want your learners to be automatically subscribed to the forum, to automatically receive notification of replies, or do you want them to be able to choose? Discussion locking allows you to close a forum if no one has replied after a certain time. To get started on our forum now, we just need to scroll down and save and return to course. As a teacher, if we go into the forum and add a new discussion topic, we can do something students cannot do, and that is make a forum post sticky by pinning it to the top of the thread. If we click that option now and post to the forum, you can see what it looks like. Finally, it's useful to learn a little more about forum subscriptions. Here is a course discussion forum on a different Moodle site with a different theme. Learners can choose whether to subscribe to the forum or not, but they can also choose whether to subscribe to individual discussion threads or not, and therefore get notifications of any replies. Our participant here is already subscribed to the top discussions, as shown by the envelope, but she's not subscribed to the bottom discussion. She can subscribe either by clicking the icon, or when she goes into the discussion, she can subscribe from the link at the top, and she can also set her notification preferences when replying to the discussion. If the site administrator has enabled it, she can also reply to the forum posts by email, but this is a setting that is disabled by default.