The Forums tool allows instructors or site administrators to create an unlimited number of discussion forums, and is integrated closely with other tools such as Lessons, Gradebook, and Resources.

A Forum is a mandatory category or grouping for topics. Topics, which are created within forums, are where participants can post conversations. A Conversation is the thread of messages in which participants post their contributions. By default, conversations can be created by instructors or site administrators and students or site members inside of a topic.  Note: Instructors or site administrators can change the settings to only allow students or members to reply to existing conversations.

Some of the features in the Forums tool include:

• Grading: Interactions can be assigned a point value and sent to the Gradebook with comments.
• Availability dates: Forums and topics can be released according to specified dates.
• Moderation: Instructors and site administrators can choose to moderate messages posted to topics.
• Counts of unread posts at a glance: On your site's Home page (select Home on the site's menubar), you can see how many unread messages or posts you have in the Forums. From My Workspace, you can see these totals for all sites in which you are enrolled.
• Email notifications: Site members can elect to receive no email notification, notification for all new postings in a site, or notification for responses to conversations they've posted in. The default is to receive no notification.
• Statistics: Forum statistics are available for instructors or site administrators to determine the participation level of individual users. Instructors or administrators can also read all of a particular participant's posts using this feature.
• Post before reading option: The instructor or site administrator can require participants to submit their posts to a topic before they have permission to read the responses of others.
• Group awareness: Instructors or site administrators can change Forum Settings and Topic Settings in combination with predefined groups to allow or deny access to specific discussions per group.
• Direct link to specific forums or topics: Using the Rich-Text Editor, instructors or site administrators can link from other tools to individual forums or topics.
• Composing messages: The Rich-Text Editor allows rich text, plain text, and HTML editing. You can add attachments to any message by uploading files or linking to items in Resources.
• Quoted text: Use the Insert Original Text option to insert the previous post into your response.
• Email the author of a message: Instructors or site administrators can directly email the author of a posting from within the Forums tool.

Notes:

• A forum with the name of the site and a topic titled "General Discussion" are created by default.
• For instructions on how to add this or any other tool to your site, see How do I add a tool to my site?

Activities course templates allow you to streamline the learning experience for your students using the Lessons tool (re-labeled as Activities in the Activities Grid site template or Weeks in the Activities Menu site template).  With these templates, you can...

• Add sub-sections and sub-pages to a main page, in order to better organize your content;
• Create individual units (organized as weeks, chapters, topics, etc.) that can be found in the Tool menu for easy navigation;
• Hide access to pages or sections until specific dates have passed, or specific actions have been completed.

The Activities course templates utilize hidden tools in order to eliminate unnecessary and distracting access to certain features by students who will instead access content and activities via links within the Activities page(s) to specific items when appropriate. Hidden tools appear in italics to instructors.

Note: If you would like to make feedback available to students in the Tests & Quizzes tool, Tests & Quizzes must be visible to students.