Forums are one of Moodle's strongest features. You can use them as building blocks in which you organize the instructional material for the entire course.
So, don't be limited by the traditional notions of forums, just as a place for group discussion. You can use the forum for creating a template for future courses, and for developing a logical and easy-to-follow sequence. Finally, you can also use the forum for one-to-one discussion between a student and an instructor.
We saw how a custom scale can be used to rate the relevance of postings; you can also use custom scales to have students rate any other aspect of a forum posting. For example, suppose your class was writing a play. You could have students contribute story ideas and character sketches to a forum. Then the class could use a custom scale to vote on whether to include them in the play.
In classes that require student participation, Moodle's log files can quantify a student's participation in class discussion. Splitting a...