Forums provide an area to post topics and have general discussions. Teachers can use forums to continue classroom discussions, to assess students' understanding of a reading selection or class concept, and for peer review assignments. There are a wide variety of forum strategies that you can use to reduce your workload in large classes, and encourage students to post thorough topics and replies.

Note: Every iLearn course has an Announcements forum at the top of the course page. The Announcements forum is a special type of forum that only teachers may post to. This forum is designed for teachers to post upcoming announcements for the course for all students to see. Forum announcements are delivered to course participants' SFSU email addresses daily at ~3am.

1. From the course page, in the upper right corner, select the Edit icon (⚙) and select Turn editing on.
2. In the week/section you want to add the forum, select the +Add an activity button.
3. In the menu list, under Activities, select Forum and the Add button.
4. Modify the settings for your forum according to your needs. See the below chart for a description on some of the settings available to change.

   Recommendation: If you are looking for the simplest forum type, the only settings you need to enter are the Forum name and Description. If you are unsure about a setting, we recommend leaving it at its default.

5. Select the Save and return to course button.

Group forums

Combined with iLearn's group functionality, you can use your forums in group mode. The idea is that you create one forum and use the group mode feature to automatically split students out based on the group they are in.

Note: There is a tendency to want to create totally separate and individual forums for group use. This is completely unnecessary as using group mode will accomplish this for you in one forum.

In the settings for your forum, look for Group Mode under common module settings. Change the Group mode to either Separate groups or Visible groups depending on your needs.

Separate groups vs Visible groups

A forum set up in Separate groups will separate out students entirely based on what group they are in. They will only be able to see and interact with their own group. Visible groups on the other hand will split out students based on what group they are in, but they will be able to see other group's work, but will not be able to respond to people other than those in their own group.

For additional assistance, contact Academic Technology: (415) 405-5555, at@sfsu.edu, LIB 80