Forum

Intro

The Forum activity provides an asynchronous discussion tool where students can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. These messages are posed in threaded discussions initially created by the teacher.

Why do I want to use Forum?

1. Engage students in deep discussions.

2. Foster collaboration and facilitate sharing of students' perspectives.

3. Track and follow student participation in the discussion.

4. Visualise how students are debating, what the most discussed subjects are, identify which students are participating and those that might not be interacting.

Educational Insight

Forums are usually used for asynchronous discussions. This gives students the opportunity to read all the messages in a thread, reflect on it and get a chance to better work on the topic/idea.

As a teacher, you are able to track student participation and encourage participation and collaboration.

What can I use Forum for?

Forum is ideal for any asynchronous discussion where you want students to share views and collaborate to expand on a topic or idea.

Pedagogies that use Forum: Reciprocal Learning, Think-Pair-Share, Predict Observe Explain, etc.

How does it work?

You (teacher) provide students with a discussion thread (or set of threads) for the students to share their views or opinions and collaborate.

Students are able to add message posting to the discussion threads, reply to each other posting and when allowed, rate/grade postings.

As teacher you can give student marks for individual postings, limit the number of posting (or posting length) per student in a thread.

When you enable it, students are allow to post messages anonymously.