Discussion Forum Reporting

Discussion Forum Reporting

Searching Forums

The 'Search forums' feature allows you to quickly and easily search through your course discussion forums. This may be helpful when wanting to view posts from specific students.

To search forums:

1. Select a forum from your course homepage, or click 'Discussions' from your course menu bar.
2. In the Search forums field, enter any desired text to run a basic search.
3. To view more search options, click 'Advanced search.' On this page, you can filter your search by date or individual forums, or select which words to include or ignore. To view all posts written by a specific student, enter their name in the field next to 'This name should match the author.'
4. On the search results page, you can: rate, edit, or delete posts, and/or view a post's parent forum.

Forum Logs

Discussion forum logs offer an at-a-glance report of all forum activity, displaying date and time information, as well as a list of all active participants. Forum logs can be filtered (such as by student, date, or action) to limit your results.

To access the forum logs:

1. From your course homepage, select your desired forum.
2. Select the Administration block on the left of the page.
3. From the 'Forum Administration' menu, select 'Logs.' This will display all activity for this specific forum.
4. To filter your results, select the filtering options at the top of the page (you can easily filter by student and time-frame), and click 'Get these logs.' Logs can also be exported from the very bottom of the results page.
   
   Hint: If you are filtering the logs to see forum activity for a specific student, the 'Post created' activity in the 'Event name' column may be most helpful as it indicates when a post has been created. Clicking 'Post created' should bring you to that student's response for that form.