Forums are one of Moodle's most useful features. A well-run class forum can stimulate thoughtful discussion, motivate students to become involved, and result in unexpected insights.

You can add any number of forums to a course and to the site's front page. By default, anyone with access to the course will have access to various forums in that course. To separate students, you can use the group mode to ensure that students from different groups cannot see each other's posts in the forum.

You can also create a course that consists only of a forum. The course's home page is the forum. The course would consist only of discussion topics. You perform this using the course type to Social under course setting.

When a student enters a general purpose forum, the student sees the description entered during the creation of the forum, as shown in the following screenshot:

While writing a forum post, the student uses the same online editor you see when creating...