 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, turn on the editing and 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 learners see on the course and the description, if you wish, may be displayed by clicking 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 instance, in Availability, you can set due dates and cut-off dates for forum posts. 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 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 and if you enable whole forum grading you can grade forum discussions and these grades get sent back to the gradebook. We will leave this for now. To get started on our forum now we just need to scroll down and save and return to course. As a teacher if we enter the forum to add a new discussion topic we can either quickly post to the forum or click Advanced for other options such as adding an attachment, pinning a post to the top or setting a display period. Let's pin this post so we can see how it displays for students and there is a pin icon here. In a different forum on a different course we can see some other settings. Forum discussions may be ordered in various ways for instance by last post. From the three dots on the right a teacher can unpin a discussion or pin a new one. Everyone can star a discussion from the three dots or by clicking on the star and for students this will move the discussion up the list under any pinned posts. Teachers can send private replies to students which only the student can read but not reply to and teachers can manually lock discussions from the three dots on the right. Here we see the message telling everyone they can no longer reply and here they can easily subscribe or unsubscribe to each discussion. Finally if you want to test a new way to view forum discussions you can access this from the user menu, preferences, forum preferences and try experimental nested discussion view.