This section covers the following MTC skills: 5.4 Forums
Forums are a powerful communication tool within a Moodle course. Think of them as online message boards where you and your students can post messages to each other while easily keeping track of individual conversations. Forums are the primary tool for online discussion and are the central organizing feature in the social course format. You’ve already posted your first message to a forum back in Chapter 2. When you posted your news item, you were posting to a special forum used in every course for announcements and news.
Forums allow you and your students to communicate with each other at any time, from anywhere with an Internet connection. Students don’t have to be logged in at the same time you are to communicate with you or their classmates. Figure 5-1 demonstrates how conversations are tracked through time, and readers can review the history of a conversation simply by reading the page. The technical term for this type of communication is asynchronous, meaning “not at the same time.” Asynchronous communications are contrasted with synchronous forms such as chat rooms, instant messaging, or face-to-face conversations.
Because forums are asynchronous, students can take their time composing replies. They can draft and rewrite until they are happy with the results instead of feeling under pressure to respond immediately. A lot of research indicates that more students are willing to participate in an asynchronous forum than are willing to speak up in class. For students whose primary language is not that of the course, people with communicative disabilities, and the just plain shy, forums offer a chance to take as much time as they need to formulate a reasonable reply. Other students, who might be afraid of embarrassing themselves by making a mistake when they speak up in class, can double-check their responses before they send them in.
The asynchronous nature of the forums creates many opportunities for you not only to replicate the conversations you have in class, but also to create entirely new activities that are difficult in a classroom setting.
Before we start creating a forum, it is important to make sure we’re using the same vocabulary. It might be useful to think of the forum module as a party. Each forum is a room at the party: there’s a living room, a kitchen, and a dining room. In each room, there are groups of people having discussions. Each discussion has a thread with everyone replying to each other about the topic. Without people having discussions, a forum is an empty, quiet space. Each forum can contain one or more discussions, which are comprised of one or more posts and replies.
Moodle forums also allow subscriptions. When a user subscribes to a forum, all new posts are automatically sent to the email address stored in the user’s profile. This makes it easy to keep track of what’s happening in the forums without constantly logging in.
Creating a forum is relatively easy. The key to success is choosing the right options for the type of forum you want to create. In addition to the news forum, Moodle has four basic forum types:
- A single, simple discussion
You can create only one discussion in this forum. This will keep the conversation focused on one particular topic.
- Each person posts one discussion
Each person on the class can start only one discussion. This would be useful when each person needs to post an assignment or a question. Each discussion can then have multiple replies.
- Q & A forum
This forum requires students to post their perspectives before viewing other students’ postings. After the initial posting, students can view and respond to others’ postings.
- Standard forum for general use
There can be one or more discussions in this forum, and anyone with permission can post multiple discussions.
To add a forum to your class:
Select Forum from the activity menu in the course section where you would like to add the forum.
On the “Adding a new forum” page, as shown in Figure 5-2, give the forum a descriptive name.
Select the forum type you want to use.
Write a descriptive forum introduction.
Select the general options:
- Force everyone to be subscribed?
If you select Yes, everyone in your course will automatically receive emails of new posts. Otherwise, people can choose whether to subscribe.
- Read tracking for this forum?
Read tracking highlights unread forum posts.
- Maximum attachment size
When students attach files to their posts, you’ll want to limit the maximum size of their posts so you don’t use up all your server space. This is especially important if you are paying a commercial hosting company for your Moodle site.
Select the grade options:
- Allow posts to be rated
Forum posts can be rated using either a numerical scale or a scale made up of words. By default, only teachers can rate forum posts, though you can use a role override to allow students to rate each others’ posts. This is a useful tool for giving students participation grades. Any ratings given in the forum are recorded in the gradebook (which we’ll cover in Chapter 13).
- Grade
If you allow posts to be rated, you can choose a scale rating using the Grade drop-down menu. You can create your own scale (which we’ll cover in Chapter 13), but for now, just pick the default “Separate and Connected ways of knowing” scale or a number between 1 and 100. The points you choose are the total for the entire forum.
- Restrict ratings to posts with dates in this range
You can allow only posts within a certain date range to be rated. This is useful if you want to keep students focused on the most recent content.
Select the post threshold for blocking options, if appropriate. Students can be blocked from posting a certain number of times in a given period and warned when they are approaching the threshold.
Select the common module options:
Click the “Save changes” button. The forum name will now be a link in the course section where you added it. If you want to go back to change any of the options, you can click on the hand icon to return to the editing forum page.
If you click on the forum name on the course page, you’ll see the main forum page, as shown in Figure 5-3.
There are some interesting features on this page. At the top right of the page is the text “This forum allows everyone to choose whether to subscribe or not” or “This forum forces everyone to be subscribed,” depending on whether you are forcing everyone to subscribe or not. Subscribing to a forum will send the user an email when there are new postings in the forum. The users can choose how they receive their emails in their profile. An alternative way of receiving forum posts is via an RSS feed. RSS feeds need to be enabled across the site and for the forum module by a system administrator.
If you click on the “Force everyone to be subscribed” link, you can flip back and forth between forcing subscription or not. If you aren’t forcing users to subscribe, the next link will read “Show/edit current subscribers,” which will give you an interface for seeing who’s subscribed and changing who is and isn’t receiving email. The last link will read “Subscribe to this forum,” which will subscribe you when you click it.
Below the subscription links, you’ll find the forum introduction you wrote when you created the forum. Below the introduction, you’ll see a button labeled “Add a new discussion topic.” You can use this to create the first discussion in the forum. If you’ve prohibited students from creating discussions, you’ll need to create one to allow anyone to use the forum.
To create a new discussion:
On the new discussion topic page, shown in Figure 5-4, give your new discussion a subject.
Write your message in the space provided. If you don’t have the HTML editor enabled, you can choose the formatting type you used in your message. Most of the time, you’ll want to leave it on Moodle Auto-Format, which will try to automatically recognize the format you used in the post.
You can choose to subscribe to the forum if subscriptions were enabled when the forum was created.
If you want to attach a file, such as an RTF document or a picture, click the Browse button, find the file on your computer, and click Open. Be sure your document is smaller than the maximum attachment size for the forum.
Click the “Save changes” button.
Once you submit your discussion topic, you’ll see a screen telling you the post was successfully saved and how long you have to make changes to your post. The time you have to make changes is set by your system administrator for everyone on the Moodle site. The default is 30 minutes, so most of the time you’ll have half an hour to go back and edit your post before it’s mailed to the subscribers. After it’s been sent, you can’t edit it unless you have the privilege set for your role.
Warning
Unless you have checked the “Mail now” box, your post won’t be mailed to subscribers until the editing time has passed. Unless your system administrator has changed the default, your forum posts won’t be sent out for at least 30 minutes.
The success screen should automatically send you back to the main forum page. You’ll see the discussion you just created. If you click on the discussion name, you’ll see the post you wrote with any attachments in the upper-right corner of the message body.
If you can still edit the post, you’ll see an Edit link at the bottom of the message body.
After the editing time has passed, your post will be emailed to all subscribers. If a student or instructor has opted to receive HTML-formatted email, she will receive an email that looks just like the posting in the browser. Otherwise, she will receive the plain-text version. As Figure 5-5 illustrates, the email will have links labeled Reply and “See this post in context,” which will bring the user right to the forum post so she can post a reply.
If you’ve enabled ratings, you’ll also see a drop-down menu at the lower-right side of other users’ posts with the scale you’ve chosen. At the bottom of the page, below all the posts in the discussion, you’ll see a button labeled “Send in my latest ratings.” If you select a rating for the post and click the button, you’ll submit your scores for the posts. The scores are then stored in the gradebook.
Once you’ve submitted a rating, it will appear next to the rating menu. If you click on the rating, you’ll see everyone’s ratings for that post.
This section covers the following MTC skills: 3.14 Search Forums
All of the forums within a course are searchable as well as browsable. Performing a forum search can find useful information easily. All forums within the course are searched simultaneously.
The Search Forums block on your course page enables you to quickly search for a particular word within a forum post. If you obtain more than one page of results, you may wish to try an advanced search.
An advanced search enables you to refine your search in any/all of the following ways:
- These words can appear anywhere in the post
One or more words you type in here will be found in all the places in the post they appear.
- This exact phrase must appear in the post
The phrase you enter must appear exactly as you enter it.
- These words should NOT be included
Identifying words you don’t want can help narrow down the resulting list of messages.
- These words should appear as whole words
The search engine will return posts that contain your words as part of a larger word. For example, if you search for “cat,” posts with the word “catalog” will be returned. Selecting whole words will look for a space before and after the words you have entered.
- Posts must be newer/older than this
This narrows down the number of posts according to time limits.
- Choose which forums to search
This enables searching within one forum only.
- These words should be in the subject
If you know the subject line of the posts you want, you can limit your searches by the subject line.
- This name should match the author
If you only want posts from certain authors, enter their names here.
Once you’ve created forums for your students, you will need to manage them during your course. As we discussed earlier, forums are great tools for getting people who don’t usually talk in class to participate. If you make your discussions an important part of your class, you can really get people talking.
Of course, a lot of people talking in a forum means there’s more to manage. Forums can quickly sprout and spread like an unruly weed, unless you do some management and pruning.
The first key to managing a forum is managing student expectations. In your syllabus, let students know how often you intend to respond to questions and posts. Let them know if you will be checking in once a day or once a week. If you don’t set expectations, some students will expect you to be on call 24 hours a day.
Jason: A professor I used to work with received a series of emails starting at 1:30 in the morning. The student wrote a question at 1:30 a.m., asked again at 2:00 a.m., and sent an annoyed message at 2:30 a.m.. Finally, at 3:00 a.m., the student sent an email saying he was going to bed and was very upset the instructor had not answered his question in time to complete the assignment. Needless to say, the professor was very surprised to find the entire series of emails when she awoke the next morning.
Dealing with rude and unruly students is another challenge of online discussions. Some students may say things in an online discussion they would never say in person. Rude or hurtful remarks can shut down a discussion or completely divert the thread of the conversation.
To avoid these situations, make your expectations for student conduct clear in your syllabus and elsewhere in the site. The use of rating scales can also moderate students’ behavior if their grade depends on getting good ratings from you or their peers. Of course, if the situation gets out of control, your ultimate recourse is to simply delete the students’ posts from the forum and then deal with it as you would any other disciplinary issue.
When forum threads get very long, you may want to archive them and start up the conversation again with a good summary. Discussions can be archived one by one or by backing up the complete forum with user data, then restoring it.
To archive a discussion:
Create a forum named “Archive forum” somewhere in your course (the first or last course section is a good idea).
Go to the forum containing the discussions you want to archive.
Enter the discussion by clicking on the discussion name. At the top-right corner of the screen, you’ll see a drop-down menu labeled “Move this discussion to” (see Figure 5-6).
Select “Archive forum” from the list.
You’ll now see the discussion in the archive forum. Click the Forums link in the navigation bar and select the original forum from the list.
Post a summary of the archived discussion in the original forum to restart the discussion.
Using an archive forum allows you to keep the discussions manageable, while retaining all of the detail of the original. It’s also an easy way to move good discussions from class to class or semester to semester.
Managing discussions is also easier with some help. A number of studies have reported the benefits of assigning groups of students to moderate duties for discussions around given topics. If a group of students knows they are responsible for being able to discuss an issue intelligently with their classmates, they are much more likely to be sure they’ve done the reading and really understand the topic. They can be responsible for moving the conversation along, answering basic questions, and archiving and summarizing a discussion.
To create student moderator groups, assign a small team of students to each forum or discussion. Be sure to enable ratings for everyone, in order to allow the student group to use ratings.
Forum capabilities are more fine-grained than any other module, giving you the ability to create a wide range of roles:
- View discussions
The basic capability allows a user to view forum discussions but not reply or start new ones.
- View hidden timed posts
This allows a user to set a display start and end date for new discussions.
Note
Timed posts need to be enabled by your system administrator in order to make use of this capability.
- Start new discussions
This allows a user to create a new discussion if the forum allows multiple discussions.
- Reply to posts
This allows a user to reply to posts within a discussion. You’ll probably want to override this capability, as well as the capability to start new discussions, for an archive forum.
- Add news
A user with this capability can post news to the course news forum. By default, only teachers can add news.
- Reply to news
This allows a user to reply to news postings in the news forum. By default, only teachers can reply to news postings.
- View ratings
- View any ratings
- Rate posts
This allows a user to rate forum posts if rating is allowed in the forum. By default, only teachers can rate forum posts.
- Create attachments
- Delete own posts (within deadline)
This allows a user to delete his own forum posts within a certain time, usually 30 minutes.
- Delete any posts (anytime)
- Split discussions
This allows a user to split discussions to create new discussions. By default, only teachers can split discussions.
- Move discussions
A user with this capability can move discussions to other forums in the course.
- Edit any post
This very powerful capability allows a user to edit any forum post at any time. By default, only teachers can edit any post.
- Always see Q & A posts
This allows a user to view Q & A forum posts without first posting.
- View subscribers
This allows a user to view the list of subscribers to a forum.
- Manage subscriptions
- Initial subscription
This allows a user to be subscribed initially to forums. By default, all roles have this capability, apart from administrators and course creators, so they don’t receive a lot of forum subscription emails.
- Throttling applies
This allows a user to be blocked from posting in a forum, according to the blocking options in the forum.
Forums are an important tool in your Moodle toolbox. They are the primary method for students to communicate with you and each other. Social constructivism is all about discussion and negotiated meaning.
Jason: I would argue that good moderation and intelligent deployment of discussion opportunities are more important to the success of a course than the static content.
Tip
MIT has said the same thing. It is posting many of its course syllabi, problem sets, and lecture notes through its OpenCourseWare initiative (http://ocw.mit.edu). Anyone can download course materials from over 700 courses for free. MIT does this because the value of an MIT education is not in the content, but in the interaction between students and the instructor. Moodle’s forums are a key tool for you to add the same value to your course.
Getting students to participate in online forums can be a challenge. If you simply create a forum and expect students to communicate online, you will be sadly disappointed. Many times instructors create a forum, give some vague instructions, and then complain that the students aren’t spontaneously communicating with each other.
For many students and instructors, starting the discussion is the hardest part. Once people start talking, at least a few will probably continue the discussion. As you start your class, it would be useful to have some icebreakers to help students get to know one another and to get used to discussing issues online.
The most effective icebreakers have a strong prompt to get people started. Ask specific questions like, “If you could speak to any person, living or dead, who would it be and what three questions would you ask them?” or, “What is your favorite comfort food and why?” You could also prompt people to tell stories about themselves. For example, you could ask students to tell a story starting with “On my last trip the funniest thing I saw or did was...” or “My favorite story about an animal is....” Whatever you use, make it concrete, compelling, and open-ended.
The primary key to student participation in online forums is tight integration with your course goals. Your forums should give students a chance to practice a skill, to collaborate on a project, or to act as resources for each other. Of course, it is important to distinguish between the types of forums and the reasons for using them in your class.
Let’s take an example to help make this clearer. Suppose you have a weekly reading you want students to discuss online before meeting face-to-face. There are two possibilities for this forum. If you want students to use the forum as a practice exercise, you’ll want to create a place where students can practice applying the new ideas they encountered in the reading. So you may want to make each week a discussion of a case study. If you want the forum to be a resource, you may want each student to post a question about the reading. You can then use the questions as a basis for discussion in class.
The final strategy for encouraging participation is to engage with the forums yourself. If your class meets face-to-face, bring up important postings and discussions in class. By merging the online environment with the face-to-face environment, you show your students that you value their participation. One of the best examples of merging online discussions with a course happened in a management course of 400+ students. The instructor assigned groups of students to small discussion groups. She and her teaching assistants randomly read a subset of the discussions each week for assessment. The instructor would also bring the best questions and discussions to class, frequently devoting half of her lecture to talking about what was happening online.
Of course, being clear about the goal of the forum is only one step. As we discussed earlier, your goals for the class may be very different from your students’ goals. You may want them to engage with the material because of its intrinsic value. Most students, however, are overworked, concerned about their grades, and doing only what is required in a large majority of their classes.
To help encourage alignment between your goals and your students’ goals, you will need to have a grading strategy for student participation. Moodle has some great tools to help you create and manage graded forums. To be successful, you must clearly define your grading criteria. You will need to grade on quality, not just quantity. A student logging in to say “I agree” once a day is not adding to the discussion. Someone who posts a thoughtful reply once a week is adding more to the course. Of course, you will need to balance between grading for quality and allowing a discussion where everyone is trying to be more clever to get a grade.
Many students need scaffolding to be able to participate effectively in an academic discussion. A quick glance at the discussion forums on MySpace reveals a great many posts that would not be acceptable in an academic environment. Help your students understand the difference between social forums and academic forums. Do you want them to support their argument with citations? Do you want them to acknowledge the other person’s point of view and then offer a critique? Do they need to support their own arguments with facts, figures, or appeals to a higher authority?
Once you have established expectations, you can begin to score according to the quality of their interactions. It is good practice to give students some credit just for participating, but full points can only be achieved with a high-quality answer.
There are many creative uses of forums, so we can only present a few of the most common here. Moodle forums are so flexible, there’s really no limit to the types of activities you can develop to take advantage of the technology.
Forums are an often-overlooked tool for peer assessment. Andy Diament, from West Cornwall in the UK, has used forums for peer assessment. His students were learning database design by developing a project over multiple weeks. Each week they would work in pairs to complete a lesson on a new topic. They would then use their new skills to complete a little more of their project and upload it to the forums for review. Each pair had their work critiqued and the best work of the week was used as a starting point for the next section of the project. Not only did the students learn from the peer review process, but they were able to develop their own project using the best work of the class.
John Rodgers, from Ontario, Canada, uses the Q & A forum type to good effect in teaching mathematics. The Q & A forum allows a single question post that the students must answer before they can see other responses. A lesson starts with the instructor asking the students to solve a math problem, identify and correct a misconception, decode the meaning of symbols from context, or engage in some other sort of exercise. The students usually spend 20–40 minutes working together in small groups to formulate a response. After the students post their answers, the Q & A forum allows them to see how others in the class have solved the problem. When that is complete, the students usually are given a series of questions to answer (using the quiz module) to see if their approach to solving the problem is robust enough. John reports, “Students are more engaged both in terms of depth (the problems force them to generate a deep understanding) and breadth within the class (the bottom of the class now engages the content at a far higher level). The time I can spend as an instructor providing quality mentoring has increased by an order of magnitude and the use of time has dramatically improved.”
This is a great example not only of using the forums but of using the power of technology to shift the role of the instructor from delivering information to mentoring students.
Bringing outside experts into your class can be difficult. You have to coordinate schedules, tear them away from their busy lives, and then hope your students are prepared enough to ask interesting questions. You can eliminate many of these problems by using the forums for communication between students and experts. The easiest strategy is to invite the expert into your forums as a regular participant. Simply give her an account and enroll her in your class. She can then participate in the forum and elsewhere in the course.
However, some people will be reluctant to participate in such an open-ended discussion. As an alternative strategy, create a forum in which students can submit questions for an interview with an expert. They can then vote on the best questions. You select the top 10 questions and send them via email to the interviewee. Your expert can then respond, via email, when it is convenient for her. If you post her responses to a new forum, your students can respond to her answers and even prepare a second round of questions, if your expert is up for it.
While many instructors frequently hope some level of debate will spontaneously break out between students around controversial issues or new concepts, it’s sometimes difficult to get the ball rolling. Try assigning your students to groups on different sides of an issue. Each post must be a reasoned argument for their side of the issue, supported by evidence. They can be graded on how well they reason and support their argument.
Tisha Bender, in her book Discussion-Based Online Teaching, discusses the advantages of using asynchronous discussions for role-playing and storytelling. In one course, she has students adopt a character from a story or novel and then play out a scene in character using the forum. The rest of the class watches the new drama unfold in front of them. Students have time to think about their responses and refine their contributions to better reflect the voice of the character rather than their own voices. Students are also less reluctant to fully respond as the character in an online forum, as they avoid the embarrassment of a face-to-face encounter.
How many times do you answer the same question from three different students? Frequently, many students have the same questions about assignments, difficult concepts, or grades. If everyone is meeting face-to-face, you can answer the question out loud, but other students may not be listening to the answer. A fully online environment is harder to manage when the questions from students arrive via email. Many teachers of fully online courses complain about the constant barrage of repetitious questions. We recommend you create a forum in which students can ask questions about the administration of the course, and separate forums for questions about the subject matter. Have them consult the forums and the responses before sending you yet another email about the date of the final exam.
Note
This feature is also useful in a business environment.
A strategy to encourage students to do their assigned reading is to create reading study group forums. This strategy works well with groups of three to five students who are collectively responsible for discussing a reading before class. Each student asks one question about the reading, and the group must answer all the questions before the start of the class session. This encourages students not only to read the assignment but to think more deeply about it through the question-and-answer process.
Tip
This strategy of having groups of students asking each other questions about course material supposedly originated with a group of engineers who were taking a class together. They were all transferred as a group midway through the semester but didn’t want to drop the class. The instructor agreed to videotape the lectures and mail them to the students. Very quickly, the instructor noticed the engineers’ performance in the class was getting worse, so he insisted they watch the videotape together. He told them they had to stop the tape every 15 minutes, and each person was to ask a question about what they had just seen. They couldn’t continue until every question was answered. By the end of the class, the remote group of engineers performed a third of a letter grade higher than the rest of the class.
Although the majority of your forums will focus on the course material, it’s important for your students to have an informal way to get to know each other, especially if the course is completely online. A social forum gives people a place to talk without worrying about being graded or having to appear really smart. It’s a good idea to start your social forum with some fun questions. Ask everyone to post an introduction telling the class where they are from; what they hope to get out of the class; and their favorite food, favorite movie, or something interesting. The more interesting the introductory post, the more likely people will respond to it and get a real discussion going.