Summary
Set up forums to facilitate discussion and help drive engagement from your learners by allowing them to collaborate within LearnUpon.
This feature is available to all customers on request.
Through social learning your learners can work together on courses, learning paths and other topics to help enhance their learning experience.
Terminology: topics, posts and comments
Within a forum, you set up topics that members of your portal can post to, or comment on.
Topics can:
- stand alone, accessible across the forum, for discussing ideas across the portal, outside courses or learning paths
- focus on courses or learning paths on your portal: visible only to those enrolled on the course or learning path
Posts are the messages which participants view, create or comment on within a topic. By default, learners can create posts, though you can limit learners to view-only access. Posts are associated with a stand-alone topic, a course or a learning path.
Comments are responses to a post.
Access permissions
All active users on a portal can take part in forums:
- admins enable forums, set branding and moderators, and create topics, and posts. They can comment, and delete comments, on any topic or post, but do not moderate the discussions
- moderators assigned to a topic can write posts and comments, moderate posts and comments, delete posts, and unpublish topics
- learners can write posts, and comment on posts, by default: you can set posts to read-only if required
In forums, learners and moderators generate content that other learners share, as long as the participant is part of the portal. Their account status affects access to the content they create:
- if a learner's account is disabled, the posts they contributed remain part of the portal
- if a learner's account is deleted, their posts are also deleted
See Disable a user account, or delete an account for more about account statuses.
Moderators
You can assign moderator permissions to learners, managers and instructors on your portal. Moderator roles are not linked to other user type permissions: they apply only within the forum. See Forums: add moderators for a topic, course or learning path.
You can assign moderators:
- by topic, by adding names when you create a topic
- by course, via Courses
- by learning path via Courses, then from center navigation Learning Paths
Notifications
By default, LearnUpon sends the following email notifications about forum content:
- forum moderators are notified when someone posts to a topic they moderate
- post owners are notified once a day about the most recent activity on popular posts they own
You can turn off email notifications if required. See Enable forums for your portal, and add topics.
Portal admins don't get notifications about forums.
Branding
To support your brand you can:
- customize the forum colors, to distinguish course topics from learning path topics
- add brand images to topics and individual posts
See: