See also Student – Communication – Discussion Forum.

Enabling the Discussion Forum

To enable the Discussion Forum for a course, an instructor user must should select the “Course Settings” page from the left sidebar, and then click the checkbox next to “Enable Discussion Forum”. This will add the “Discussion Forum” page to the left sidebar for both students and teaching staff.

Features Available to Teaching Staff

The discussion forum comes with many features that enables effective communication between students and the teaching staff.

• Announcements
  Members of the Teaching Staff may specify that a new thread is an announcement that will be pinned to the top of the Discussion Forum thread list. Announcements will be marked with a thumbtack to indicate their importance.

  Instructors can also choose to send the announcement as a Submitty system email to all members of the course, if

also by email, if configured on the server.

• Post Edit History users have the ability to edit their post. Members of the teaching staff have the ability to view each edit.

• Statistics
  Members of the teaching staff can view forum posting history for each student in the course, with links to every post. This feature is useful to award bonus points to students who engage on the forum and make impactful contributions to the course discussions.

• Merging Threads
  Often times students will ask the same question. Members of the teaching staff have the ability to merge similar threads. When merging a thread t1 into another thread t2, it is only possible to merge t1 into t2 if t2s last post occurred before t1 was created.

• Alphabetic Post View Sorting Members of the teaching staff may sort the posts alphabetically by student name to aid in grading.