The Moodle Forum activity is a great way to generate course-related discussions by your students, as they respond to your course readings or other issues that you (or their fellow students) raise. When a forum has active participation by students, with posts and replies, the forum allows students to practice writing for an actual audience. To create a Forum in your Moodle course:
- Log in to Moodle at https://moodle.bucknell.edu, and click on the link for your course in the Current Course List module on the right-hand side of the screen.
- If editing is not currently on, click on the
button at the top right of your screen.
- Scroll down to the topic area in your course where you you want the forum to appear, and click on the "Add an activity or resource" link at the bottom-right corner of the topic block:
- The activities will be listed in alphabetical order in a large grid. Click on the
button to begin the process of adding a forum to your course.
- Add a name for the forum in the "Forum name" field. You may also want to add a description in the "Description" field, giving your students specific instructions on what you expect in a forum posting, how often you expect students to post messages, and how often they should reply to one another's posts.
- The "Standard forum for general use" is the most common type of forum, allowing for unfettered discussions among students. Since that and the rest of the default settings are appropriate for most uses of the discussion board forum, scroll down to the bottom of the page, and click on the "Save and return to course" button:
Students will click on the link for the forum to see the forum activity. To launch a new thread, students click on the 
button. To reply to an existing post, students click on the link for the post, and then they click on the "Reply" button: 
For more detailed instructions on the Forum activity in Moodle, see the Moodle.org forum documentation on Moodle.org.