Summary

Forums are one of Moodle's strongest features. You can use them as building blocks in which you organize the instructional material for the entire course.

We saw how a custom scale can be used to rate the relevance of postings; you can also use custom scales to have students rate any other aspect of a forum posting. For example, suppose your class was writing a play. You could have students contribute story ideas and character sketches to a forum. Then, the class could use a custom scale to vote on whether to include them in the play.

In classes that require student participation, Moodle's log files can quantify a student's participation in class discussion. Splitting a discussion can bring it back on track when it has been taken over by an unintended subject.

Whenever you need to involve students in a discussion, a Moodle forum offers a place for students and teachers to have a productive discussion.

In the next chapter, we will continue to work with the ways in which Moodle 3.0 encourages learning through interaction and collaboration.