1.2.2. Setting up a discussion forum and attendance activities

Another Moodle tool that could be used for tracking learners’ engagement and supporting their self-regulated learning is the discussion forum. It is important to configure its settings correctly so that learners monitor their own learning, are aware of the most recent discussion and can engage in discussions. It is up to you to decide if you want a discussion forum to generate digital evidence. If you want to analyse learners’ social and cognitive engagement through participation in discussion forums, and at the same time support learners’ SRL, then when adding a new forum to a course, you should pay attention to the following settings:

- Availability, where the due date and cut-off dates can be set up, after which students can no longer post. After the dates are set and enabled, they are displayed in the calendar and so students stay informed that they need to contribute to the discussion and how much time they have left to do this.

- Subscription and tracking. When course participants are subscribed to the forum, they receive notifications of every new post. When designing a forum activity, a teacher needs to decide the subscription mode, whether it will be optional, forced, auto or disabled (fig. 5). 

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Figure 5. Forum subscription settings

When subscription mode is set as optional, course participants can choose if they want to be informed of new postings or not. However, if a teacher wants to foster learners’ engagement in some specific forum and support students’ self-regulated learning by encouraging them to reflect on their own engagement and plan their learning by timely contribution to discussions on a given topic, he/she may select a forced subscription. In such a case, all course participants will be subscribed automatically. This mode might be useful at the very beginning of the course when a teacher expects all students to be aware of posts that are related to course content or the overall learning process. Similarly, it might be useful when a forum activity is used for learning purposes so that all learners are aware of the ongoing discussion on a given topic.

Moreover, by setting up read tracking as optional, students see and monitor which posts have not been read yet (fig. 6).

Figure 6. Forum read tracking settings

Finally, activity completion should also be set-up according to the aim of the forum and its contribution to learning progress. Please check the video tutorial on setting-up a Forum in Moodle 

Another setting for data collection and learning monitoring is Attendance, which can be used for a twofold reason: (1) teachers monitor and take attendance during classes and (2) students monitor their own attendance. This setting generates data either for the entire group or for an individual student. Teachers can specify if the attendance regards lectures, workshops, seminars, labs or units.