The Forum activity is an online communication tool for students and faculty to exchange ideas by posting comments. A forum can contribute significantly to successful communication and community building in an online environment. Forum posts are not limited to text – you can include images, video, and audio in a forum post to better collaborate with students.
How to post to a forum:
- Log in to the CLE (cle.ucsf.edu) and navigate to a course
- Click the forum link in a CLE course
- Click on the Add a new discussion topic button to add a new thread inside of the forum or click the Discussion title link and click the Reply link to reply to a previous post
- Compose the forum post
- Type in a subject and content of the message – these are both required and it makes sense to keep the subject brief (like in an email) and to word it so that other people know what your discussion topic is about
- Choose to receive or not receive notifications for new posts to the forum, unless the subscription mode has been forced by the faculty and everyone will receive notification for new posts. If you have questions about forum subscriptions, contact the course faculty to inquire about forum subscription settings
- Add a file as an attachment to the post if you choose or required
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Pin Forum posts -Instructors have the option of pinning discussions, to pin the discussion to the top of the list of forum posts. Any forum discussions which come after that will appear underneath this pinned post. If you later untick the box to ‘unpin’ it, it will display as a regular forum discussion, moving down the list when others are posted
- Set a display period of a date and time for the forum post to appear
- Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the Post to forum button
- You will now see a message giving you 30 minutes in which you can edit or delete your posting. After that time, the post will appear automatically in the form and is emailed to everybody subscribed to the forum.
Pin existing forum posts
Posts can be pinned when posts are created (as listed above) or they can be edited afterwards.
- Open the forum activity
- Click and open the forum post that you would like to pin
- Click the three dot icon that appears at the end of the row
- Select Pin this discussion. The forum post that you pin will now appear at the top of the forum.
Permalink
Create a permalink to create a direct link to a specific forum post, the link can be copied from the browser bar and easily shared with others. This is really helpful because if you just link to the forum, your post may be moved down the list as newer posts appear on the list.
- Open the forum activity
- Click and open the forum post that you like to link to directly
- Click permalink
- The post will be highlighted and you’ll noticed that the URL will be specific to this post
- Highlight the link, copy and paste to share it elsewhere
Forum notifications
Depending on how the faculty has configured the forum, you may be forcibly subscribed to the forum. This means you will be unable to unsubscribe yourself from forum notifications and will receive an email every time someone posts to the forum. If you have questions about forum subscriptions, contact the course faculty to inquire about forum subscription settings.
Depending on the subscription mode used for the forum, you may be able to unsubscribe from the forum by clicking the Unsubscribe me from this forum link located in the Administration block on the left side of the page.
If you are unable to unsubscribe to a forum, but want to receive fewer forum notification emails from the CLE, you can update your CLE email digest settings. Email digest settings are configured in your CLE profile (see instructions below).
To update how many emails you receive from CLE forums:
- Log in to the CLE (cle.ucsf.edu)
- Click your name on the user menu from the top-right corner of CLE and click Preferences
- While on the Preferences page and click Forum Preferences
- In Forum preferences, you can configure how often you receive emails from the CLE using the Email Digest Type drop-down menu
- Choose from the following:
- No Digest: You will receive one e-mail per forum post
- Complete: You will receive one digest e-mail per day containing the complete contents of each forum post
- Subjects: You will receive one digest e-mail per day containing just the subject of each forum post
- From the Forum auto-subscribe drop-down, configure whether or not to automatically subscribe to forums that you post to.
- In Forum Tracking drop down, Select Yes: highlight new posts for me and posts will be highlighted in the following places: Dashboard, Course page, Within the forum itself, and In forum discussion threads
- Click the Save changes to save your preferences.