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Forum

With a forum, you can provide a communication platform to the students in your course. You can for example set up a forum to let your students discuss a specific topic as part of their homework or give them the opportunity to ask questions about the contents of your course. The forums have an integrated search function to avoid multiple threads on the same topic.

To set up a functional forum, you first have to activate the forum application and then create a new forum.

  1. Click on “New Forum” and fill in the form.
  2. Click “OK” to save your data.

Now you or your students can start new forum threads. Please note that students are only able to create new threads if you’ve activated this option for the forum in question.

If you’re using a forum for homework assignments, you can also restrict forum access to specific members.    

You can use a forum for hosting group discussions. For such uses, you can restrict forum access to specific members.

  1. In the forums application, click the “Administration” button.
  2. Click on “Permissions” next to the forum in question.

You can modify the permissions in two ways.

Option one:

  1. Select or deselect the different permission options (Read, Create, etc.) to edit the permissions list.
  2. Click on “Confirm” to save the settings.

Option two:

  1. Click the button “Grant permission” to assign a permission to a specific user.
  2. Select “admin”.
  3. Select the appropriate person, ideally by entering his or her student ID number or WU username.
  4. Click “OK” twice.

Once you’ve changed the permissions, only authorized users can access the forum contents.

If you’d like to use a forum for several parallel courses to make sure that relevant information is available to all students of all courses concerned and to avoid repeat questions, you can use a forum as part of a course repository and transfer it to the relevant courses.

  1. Create a forum in a course repository that is connected to several parallel courses (cf. "How can I set up a forum?").
  1. Go to the individual courses and deactivate and reactivate the forums application.  Please make sure to complete these steps in this exact sequence.

The course repository forum will automatically appear in the individual courses.

Students can use the transferred forum to post their questions either in the course repository or the individual courses. The forums are synchronized automatically so that everyone always sees the latest version of the forum.

By activating the file upload function you allow all forum users to upload files. This can include student texts (e.g. presentations as video files, homework as text files), feedback (e.g. peer feedback as a podcast) or learning materials (e.g. journal articles as PDF).   

 
  1. Activate "Attachments" directly below the application Forum ("Administrate" / "Applications", cf. "How do I activate an application?")
From now on the function of the file attachment is activated for all existing forums. If you want to change the setting in a single forum, you can also deactivate this function later using the settings under "Administer".