3.1.7 Facilitating forums

Go to your Moodle practice area and try setting up a Discussion Forum with settings for Read tracking, while also observing the other available settings. 

Then do as many of the follow as seem helpful to you:

1. If you are starting a course in the near future, try writing some participant guidelines for use of the course Discussion forums. 
2. Consider the following scenario: Some of your participants are complaining that the discussion forum messages are flooding their email inboxes. How do you let them know how to use Moodle settings to help, without discouraging them to continuing following the discussions?
3. The next time you either participate or lead a Discussion form, pay special attention to how the discussion flows or is disrupted by how people contribute their messages. How does it compare to a good face-to-face discussion? How is it different? Can it sometimes be better?
4. If you have used Discussion forums in the past, go back and observe how the discussions were conducted. How might you have interacted as facilitator to improve the discussion? 
5. Looking at current or past Discussion forums, switch your role to that of a student to see if your perspective on the forum changes.
6. Go to Moodle.org to view some of the Discussion forums conducted there about a topic that interests you. Take a critical perspective about how the participants use the forums.