Summary
Forums with topics provide discussion space, and help learners engage with your courses. Add stand-alone topics, visible to all portal users, or add topics linked to a specific course or learning path.
This feature is available to all customers on request.
Contact the support team or your Customer Success Manager to add forums to your portal.
Sub-portals do not inherit forum settings from the top-level portal: you need to request the forum feature for each portal. For forums in multiple portals, include the portal names in your request.
Access permissions
Admins set up a forum for a portal.
Admins and moderators can create topics: learners can add posts, and make comments, but can't create new topics.
Admins can assign any portal member as a forum moderator: forum permissions are not linked to the LearnUpon user type.
Set up forums for your portal
After the support team or CSM adds forums to your portal, forums are visible only to portal admins.
You can set up and test forums across the portal, including topics, and viewing and messaging options, before making them available for all users.
You need to turn on forums for the whole portal, to access forums for courses and learning paths.
By default LearnUpon forums start with:
- the forum landing page showing the list of available topics
- sending email notifications to moderators and post owners about topics
You can change these defaults if required.
The following screenshot shows default Forum Settings, after the support team adds the feature to your portal. This test portal uses learning paths.
- From main navigation go to Settings > My Portal > General Settings.
- Under Forum Settings, select Enable Forum.
- Save to finish.
Optional steps to change default settings:
- To change the default view a list of topics to posts, select Show "All Posts" as default landing page.
- Select Course Topic Color and Learning Path Topic Color, if required, to distinguish your courses and learning paths. Learning path colors are available when you have learning paths in your portal.
- Change Send emails: by default, LearnUpon sends email notifications to moderators and post owners about forum activity.
- Change Send daily summary: sends a summary of post activity from the previous day, to the post owner.
- Change Notify moderator about created posts: tells moderator about every new post created within a topic.
- Save to finish.
All users now see a Forums menu item in main navigation.
Set up forums for a course or a learning path
You can enable forums to support a course or learning path. This setting creates a dedicated topic, about the course or learning path, on the portal forum. This topic is available only to enrolled learners.
Note: you need to set up forums for the whole portal, before creating course and learning path forums.
- From main navigation select Courses.
- Select the Course or Learning Path.
- Select Forum Settings.
- Select Enable course forum or Enable learning path forum.
- In Moderators, select 1 or more users to moderate the course or learning path discussion.
- Choose setting for Learners can create posts.
- Select Save to finish.
The following screenshot shows Learning Path Forum options, after turning on the forum.
Add topics to your portal forum
Topics are the framework for your learner's discussion. Admins need to create topics, to start the discussions, otherwise learners cannot add posts or comments.
The topic Status tells you who can access the topic:
- Draft saves the topic content without publishing, accessible only to moderators and admins
- Published makes the topic immediately available to all users
Graphics and images make the forums more engaging and easy to recognize. When you upload images you can crop and resize them to fit the dimensions provided, and add alt-text to ensure you meet accessibility standards. See Images: crop images and provide alt-text.
- From main navigation select Forum.
- Select Create New Topic.
- To add a graphic to your topic, select Choose (provides default images) or Upload.
- Complete Title and Short Description: this text appears in the forum.
- For Status, select Draft or Published.
- For Who Can View This Topic?, select All Portal Users or Restricted by Group.
- If you select Restricted by Group, you can select the group in Select Groups.
- For Who Can Post In This Topic?, select Anyone with permission to view the Topic or Admins and Moderators only (Locked).
- For Moderator, enter a user's name to set them as moderator for this topic.
- Select Create to finish.
The following screenshot shows Create New Topic.
See: