Forums is a communication tool that instructors or site leaders can use to create an unlimited number of discussion forums for their course or project sites. Forums is designed to be an effective tool for both academic and collaborative work, and is integrated closely with other tools (e.g., Resources and Gradebook).
Discussion forums: Asynchronous discussion provides an opportunity for your site participants to engage site resources and each other, and allows for the free expression of convergent and divergent ideas. Interactions can be assigned a point value and sent to the Gradebook with comments.
Viewing forums: On your site's Home page (select
Home
on the site's menubar), participants can see
how many unread discussion forum messages they have. On
the Forums screen, participants see the number of unread
messages and the grand total of messages for each topic. In the
forums list, forums and topics are viewed as a thread by
default.
Composing messages: A WYSIWYG interface allows rich text, plain text, and HTML editing. You can add attachments to any message by linking to files or web links in Resources.
Quoted text: Use the Insert Original Text
option to insert the previous post into your response.
Statistics: Forum statistics are available for site owners to determine the participation level of individual participants.
Print-friendly view: A print-friendly view is available allowing for easy printing of discussions.
Import forums and topics: Re-use materials easily by importing forums and topics from your other sites.
Settings: The site owner (or another participant with the appropriate role) can enable participants to submit their posts to a topic before they have permission to read the responses of others.
Group awareness: Site leaders can change forum and topic settings in combination with pre-defined groups to allow or deny access to specific discussions per group.