 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, enable Edit Mode, Top Right, 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. Click Once to go straight to the setup screen, or click the I icon for more details and then click Add bottom right. 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 add a new discussion topic. However, if you click the drop down, 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 click the question mark icon, the Help, and you can find out more. There are other settings worth exploring. For example, 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 automatically receive notifications 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. If you enable whole forum grading, you can grade forum discussions and these grades get sent to the grade book. We'll leave this for now. In activity completion, if we want to track that students have accessed the forum, do we want them manually to click to confirm they've seen it or do we want it automatically marked complete when they've simply viewed it or based on certain criteria such as a number of discussions or replies? No need to click View as well if you're specifying other criteria. To alert course participants that a forum activity has been added or updated, click Send Content Change Notification. 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 or pinning a post to the top. In this Moodle site, the admin has also allowed teachers to set a display period. Let's pin this post so we can see how it displays for students. And there is a pin icon. In a different forum, in a different course, we can see some other settings. Discussions can be easily starred and for students this will move the discussion up under any pinned posts. Forum discussions may be ordered in various ways for instance by last post. Everyone can easily subscribe to individual discussions or to the whole forum. From the three dots on the right, a teacher can unpin a discussion or pin a new one or manually lock a discussion and if you change your mind as the teacher just post in the forum again to unlock it. Finally, it's useful to know that teachers can send private replies to students which only that student can read but not reply to.