Introduction

The Forum activity is a flexible activity that helps you host and manage asynchronous discussions in your class. Though it's called "Forum" in AsULearn, you may be more familiar with the term "discussion board". Most faculty will use the Forum activity to allow students to post their own discussion topics, and reply to posts from their classmates. This only requires a small number of settings when creating a new Forum. 

Default settings

If you were to create a new Forum in AsULearn using all of the default settings, you would create a Forum that:

  • Is available immediately, and has no cut-off time for posting
  • Is ungraded
  • Allows students to attach several documents
  • Allows the instructor to provide feedback exclusively by adding their own reply to student posts and replies 

Using these default settings, the only information you'd have to enter is the Forum's name, and the instructions for students. 

Creating a simple forum

1. Turn editing on in your course.

2. Click the  Add an activity or resource  link inside any topic.

3. Select " Forum".

4. In the  General  section, enter the  Forum name.

5. Provide instructions for the assignment in the Description field.

Forum Type affects this step

The default Forum Type in these instructions is Standard forum for general use. In this Forum Type, anyone (student or instructor) can create as many new posts as they want, and can reply to any posts from other users.

If you change the Forum Type to Q&A Forum, you'll need to create any posts the students will be replying to. 

6. At the bottom of the page, click the Save and return to course or Save and display button. Click Cancel to abandon creating the assignment.

I want to grade student posts and replies

Set Type to "Point" in the Grade setting under the Whole Forum Grading heading. 

I want to prevent students from posting after a certain date, but leave the Forum visible so we can all see the past discussions

Either:

  1. Enable a Cut-off date under the Availability heading, or
  2. Set a time in the Lock discussions after period of inactivity setting under the Discussion Locking heading. 

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