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Office of the Vice-President for Academic Affairs

Learning to Learn, Excellence in Learning at DCU

ExL@DCU

Tips for becoming a successful online learner at DCU: Communicating online

Moodle's discussion forums enable you to communicate with lecturers, tutors and other course participants in a text-based format. Discussion forums are asynchronous: course participants do not need to be logged in at the same time to communicate with each other, and they can contribute to the discussion at a time that suits them. In some modules participation in online discussions is optional. In others, you may be allocated marks for your contributions to discussions.

Utilise Moodle's forum subscription options effectively

Moodle allows you to choose how posts made to Moodle's discussion forums are sent to your email account. It is worth considering which option suits your style of working best. You can choose your subscription format in the "Email digest type" field in your Moodle user profile

  • "No digest" will send individual copies of every post made on each course you are a participant on, 30 minutes after they are posted, to your email account.
  • "Complete" will send you a single email per day that contains the full text of all posts made to the course that day.
  • "Subjects" will send you a single email each day with hyperlinks to each of the posts made that day.
Remember that you have a limit on the storage space available in your DCU student email account: if you let your email account fill up, then you will stop receiving copies of posts from Moodle forums!