The forum is an activity where participants can share and discuss concepts and ideas by posting comments. Forum posts can be graded (rated) by the lecturer or students.
https://www.monash.edu/learning-teaching/innovation/moodle-userguides/forums
Forums and Open Forums
You can choose to create a Forum or an Open Forum. They share most features but have some important differences. Forums are distinct in providing Permalinks, Sticky posts and settings located in the Preferences screen.
Advanced forums allow the option of anonymous forums and provide the ability to export forum posts.
The first section of this Learning topic covers the things you can do in both Forums and Advanced Forums, while Advanced forums explains anonymous forums and export forum posts available only in the Advanced Forum.
Understand the different types of forums
There are five types of forums that you can set up in Moodle:
- A single simple discussion - you can use this forum type to set up a single discussion topic which all your students can reply to
- Each person posts one discussion - you can use this to allow each student to post exactly one new discussion topic, which everyone can then reply to
- Q and A forum - you can use this forum if you want to ensure students first post their response before viewing other students' posts
- Standard forum displayed in a blog-like format - you can set up this open forum and allow anyone to start a new discussion at any time, in which discussion topics are displayed on one page with "Discuss this topic" links
- Standard forum for general use - this forum has minimal restrictions and anyone can start a new discussion at any time