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Facilitating Forums

Forums are a key component of courses at Royal Roads university and are used for communication, collaboration and debate. Forums are the primary method by which you will communicate with students and how students communicate with each other. Forums can be set up for posting instructor bulletins or for social interaction. Forums support class wide or private, team-based discussion. As the course instructor, you can see and access all forums, whereas students can only access class wide forums and their own team forums.

Topics covered in this article:

• Participation And Scaffolding

• Commitment And Participation

• Student-Centred Forums

• The News Forum

• Instructor Forums

• Suggestions for Using Forums

• Grading Forums

• Suggestions for Using Ratings In Forums 

 Participation And Scaffolding

While one of the great advantages of e-learning is the flexibility it affords participants, this does not mean that days or weeks should pass without response and discussion in a Forum. This is perhaps most especially true at the beginning of a course when students and instructors are new to each other and in need of welcome messages and encouragement. Your role will be important, particularly as an online community begins to develop. It is during these initial stages of introductory material that a group of students can become a community of participants who begin to grow in their understandings of course material and individual contributions to the knowledge construction process.

As the discussions progress and students become accustomed to the mechanics and the tone of the forums then there are key ways in which your input can be reduced, thereby helping to foster a community that is less dependent on the instructor. Even then, however, you will want to be a presence in the discussions although you may choose to be one of many contributors rather than the font of all wisdom.

Commitment And Participation

Ask yourself if:

1. you wish to have involvement in the forum or if you want the students to lead and own the space
2. you want the forum to add value to the face-to-face environment or have a life of its own in its own right outside the classroom or seminar room
3. you are prepared to make appropriate contributions to the discussion in order to:
   1. encourage discussion if students are quiet
   2. help shape ideas if students begin to wander off-task
   3. define your role as discussions and the course progresses
   4. explicitly but gradually relinquish control of the discussions
   5. encourage and support students to share control of discussions (for example you might ask a student or group of students to summarize contributions to a discussion thread/topic or you might ask students to initiate discussion topics)

Student-Centred Forums

We know that effective learning requires access to social and academic networks for both study material and emotional support; as such, online communities can offer a holistic knowledge construction and support mechanism and recognize that affective activity is effective.

Social forums, often called ‘learner or student cafes’ can be set up for courses, depending on the student need. Such spaces provide a common area for students to come together and discuss unlimited topics, including social activities and educational ideas. They are supportive spaces for students. Students will experience a greater sense of community within and a sense of belonging to an educational institution or individual department having had the experience and convenience of the social forum on their course; this could have implications for retention.

These spaces are typically highly active, especially in first term. Depending on your institution, they are usually self monitored by students, who understand that the same ‘rules’ and ‘netiquette’ that apply to them within any computing space, also apply in Moodle.

The News Forum

Moodle courses automatically generate a Latest News forum which defaults to automatically subscribe all participants in a course. The name of the News Forum can be changed to something more appropriate, such as ‘Instructor Bulletin', 'Announcements’ or the like. This is a useful feature and many use this forum ito announce important information about course work throughout a term or special announcements relating to events. Note that students cannot reply to the Latest News forum; it is read-only for them.

Instructor Forums

An instructor-only forum may be added to a course by creating a hidden forum. Instructors are able to view hidden course activities whereas students cannot.

Suggestions for Using Forums

Marie Graf discusses how she uses Forums in the video below, including managing multiple forums and using timed release in the News forum to pre-post messages to students.

Other suggestions:

1. If your course is at a distance, if your face-to-face time is limited, or if you just wish to foster a sense of community which supplements your face-to-face course, it is good practice to begin with a welcome or introductory message or thread in one of your forums. This welcome or introduction invites participants, for example, to post some specific details to introduce themselves to you and their peers. This can be your icebreaker or you can have an icebreaker separately.
2. If you have two questions for participants to answer, starting the two strands or topics within the forum itself will both help learners to see where to put their responses, and remind them to answer all parts of your question.
3. Remember that you are communicating in an environment that does not have the benefit of verbal tone, eye contact, body language and the like. Careful consideration of your communication is, therefore, necessary.
4. Postings to a forum are always written but they can take different forms and you may wish to consider what form best suits the activity. For instance, you might choose to articulate a form of contribution in order to be explicit. Thus you might say, 'This is a think-aloud forum in which, together, we will try to tease out ideas and possibilities' or 'This is a formal forum in which you are invited to share your ideas on (topic x) and where you might have already suggested learners plan those ideas offline or in another kind of activity within Moodle.
5. Create a forum where only the instructor can start discussions, but the students can only reply. Each thread you start contains an essay question (or several similar ones). The students make a bullet point plan for the essay and post it as a reply. This works well as a revision strategy as the students can see how others have approached the same task. Once everyone has posted their plan, you can start a discussion as to which plans seem better and why. Creating a scale to use for rating the posts can be useful so that the students can see how helpful other people think their efforts were. (Note: At this time, there is no option to hide the "Add new discussion topic" button, so you need to tell your students not to start discussion threads, but to only reply to threads started by the instructor. If you only need one thread, then you can use the "a single simple discussion" format and the "Add new discussion topic" button is not available to the students.)

Grading Forums

You can use the ratings scales to grade student activities in a forum. There are several methods for calculating the grade for a forum that can be found in the Forum settings under grades. There are 5 ways to aggregate ratings automatically to calculate a forum grade for the gradebook. These include: Average, Max, Min, Count, and Sum. Forum ratings are aggregated in the gradebook.

Suggestions for Using Ratings In Forums 

Gil Wilkes uses ratings in forums, but not for grading. He uses the satisfactory scale to rate the questions students ask in a Q & A forum in order to help them make decisions about which questions (and answers) to read within the forum.  He also asks students to rate his answers to their questions - "is this an effective answer" - to improve his ability to provide information.

Contact your instructional designer to discuss forum options for your course.