There are a few tried and tested ways to optimize the interactive forum experience. Here is a brief list:

Some activities in Moodle are almost always individual. When students complete these activities, they have a reasonable expectation that their work will not be shared with the class. For example, when a student answers a quiz question, he/she reasonably expects that what he/she wrote will not be shared with the entire class. Other activities do not carry this expectation of privacy. For example, when a student posts to a forum, he/she expects that posting to be read by the rest of the class.

Students feel good when they see their work acknowledged. They also feel confident when they know what is expected. We can use the forum to answer students' questions, but there are other ways to use the forums to acknowledge work and to help the students develop an "I can do it" attitude.

One good way is to build a forum that includes samples of successful student work. The students can see how other students—often students in the past—approached their work. They can get a good idea of how to get started, and they can feel less intimidated by fear of the unknown.

Let's create a forum named "sample work". Before posting work from a student in the sample work forum, consider if the student can reasonably expect that work to be private. If so, ask the student's permission before posting it. In any case, be sure to remove identifying names and labels. That is, remove anything from the work that would indicate which student created it. This might make the student more comfortable with having the work posted in the sample work forum.

If you expect to use a sample work forum in a class, you should clearly indicate that in the course syllabus and introduction. The idea that they have guidelines and live documents as instructional material and models can be a big relief to students. However, if any student is uncomfortable with having his/her work posted (even if it has been anonymized), please be sure to let them know you respect their wishes. The forum should be a friendly and supportive place.

In Moodle, you can create several types of forums. Each type can be used in a different way to get the best out of it. The types of forums are:

Each of these forum types can be used to create a different kind of sample work forum. The subsections coming up cover the use of each forum type.

You select the forum type while creating the forum, on the Editing Forum page:

Single simple discussion forum

The next screenshot is an example of a single-topic forum. The forum consists of one topic at the top of the page, and everything else on that page is a reply from the students. Readers can reply to the topic, but not create new ones.

This is especially useful if you want to select the best work as an example for each topic or week in your course. You can always end each topic of week with the best work as an example so that discussion can take place on it.

Standard forum

In a standard forum, the default setting allows students to create new topics and post replies to the topics. This makes it an open forum, which would be useful if you want your students to be able to post their own work or if you want to post examples or models that you could label "sample work". Following is an example of a multitopic forum. Each piece of work is a new topic.

One way to keep the sample work forum organized is to allow only the teacher to create new topics. Each topic is an example of student work, posted by the teacher. Students discuss each example by replying to the topic. To accomplish this, you'll need to disable the students' ability to create new topics.

By default, the Student role in Moodle enables students to create new topics in a standard forum. You can disable this by referring to the following steps:

1. Select the forum in which you want to disable the students' ability to create new topics.
2. Select Update this Forum.
3. Select the Roles tab, and then the Override roles subtab, as shown in the following screenshot:
   
4. Select Student. This brings up the Overrides page.
   
5. For the setting Start new discussions, select Prevent.
6. Click the Save changes button.

In Moodle, permissions at a lower context override permissions at a higher context. For example, by default the role Student has the permission for Start new discussions set to Allow. However, you could set this to Prevent for a specific course because a course is a lower context than the entire site; for that course the permission Prevent will override the site's wide setting of Allow. A single activity, such as this forum, is the lowest context in Moodle. Overriding permission in a single activity will not affect anything else; it affects only that activity.

Note

Moodle's online help has a good discussion about the differences between Inherit, Allow, Prevent, and Prohibit. It also describes how conflicts between permissions are solved by the software. If you're going to use Override roles elsewhere in Moodle, read this section of the help.