Shared forums and topics

Shared discussion forums enable you to make discussion forums and topics available across multiple org units. This is an ideal way to encourage interaction between users in different course offerings. You can create shared forums for the organization, a department, a semester, or any custom org unit type (for example, faculty, school, area). A shared forum is available in the org unit where it orginates from and all org units beneath that org unit in the organization hierarchy.

You can use shared forums for:

Users access shared forums from the Discussions tool on the navbar of any course offering (or other org unit) where the forum is available. Users can only access a shared forum if they belong to the org unit where the forum originates; their role in that org unit determines their permissions for the shared forum.

For example, if a user enrolls in the Math department with permission to access discussions at the department level, they can see all the Math department’s shared forums in any course offering within that department. Shared forums can be hidden within any org unit by any user who has the permission Hide Shared Forums, by clearing the setting Display shared forums in the Forums & Topics list on the Discussions tool’s Settings page.

Access the Shared Discussion Forums area

Click Shared Forums from the Admin Tools menu on the minibar.

You can create and manage all shared forums from Shared Forums. For example, you don’t need to access the Math department to create a shared forum for that department.

These tasks are identical to working with standard forums and topics, except that you specify the org unit type (department, semester, etc.) and the specific org unit (Math department vs. Science department, Fall semester vs. Winter semester) as an additional step in most tasks.

See also

 

Desire2Learn Help | About Learning Environment