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Discussion forums provide an online venue for learners and instructors to discuss courses, and to ask and answer questions. For instance, learners can ask questions in a forum related to a particular topic and learn from each other's responses. Instructors can monitor forums as a moderator, intervening if required.
Forums can be made available for specific set of users. For example, you may wish to create a course-specific forum only for the learners and instructor enrolled in the course. To provide access to a forum from a course's Knowledge Center, you assign the forum to the learning object (module, session or program) via the Catalog Editor, Course CSV Loader or Program CSV Loader. Users can also access forums from the Connect menu.
Forums consist of topics and replies to those topics. (Replies are known also as posts. The number of posts in a topic being the number of replies to the original topic post.) You can create different types of forum which determine who can create topics and reply to them.
Forum types:
A unidirectional forum where only the forum moderator can create topics and write posts. Learners can only read them.
A forum where learners can only reply to a topic but not start a new one. New topics can only be started by the forum moderator.
A forum where learners can reply to existing topics and start new topics.
You can create forum categories to organize your forums, and assign forums to them. You can specify a target audience for a forum category so that every forum assigned to it has the same target audience.
When you configure a new discussion forum, ensure an appropriate forum category has been configured first, as the category defines which users can participate in or view the forum topics.
You can set access permissions for forums and forum categories to specify which users have read-only or unrestricted access to them in the Manage Center.
Administrators with unrestricted access to the Discussion Forums feature in System Roles (Manage Features > Community Manager Features) can configure forums.
Administrators with unrestricted access to the Discussion Forum Categories feature in System Roles (Manage Features > Community Manager Features) can configure forum categories.
Forum moderators can delete forums or any topic or reply within forums for which they have unrestricted access permission. Administrators with the Allow Forum Moderation permission in System Roles (Data Access Control > Role General Permissions) can moderate forums.
To configure a forum category, go to Manage Center > Communicate > Discussion Forum Categories.
To configure a forum, go to Manage Center > Communicate > Discussion Forum Categories.
Additional Information
Create a Discussion Forum Category
Edit a Discussion Forum Category
Delete a Discussion Forum Category
