• Go to Activities in the navbar of your course.
• Click on Discussions. You will now see the Discussions homepage.

• The Discussions homepage shows you an overview of all the forums and the accompanying topics that have been created for the specific course. This is the Discussions List.
• The Subscriptions tab allows you to select how you want to receive notifications (in the form of an email) about discussions forums, topics, and threads to which you are subscribed.
• The tab Group and Section Restrictions allows you to see which group of students you have granted access to which forum and/or topic. You can also change the access from here. Click on Save when you are done editing. 
• You can generate statistics about the forums, topics, and/or their users using the Statistics tab. You can use this tool to see which students are participating in a discussion, which topic generates the most or least reactions, et cetera. You can export this data to Excel.  

1. Click New to create a new discussion forum or topic.
2. Click More Actions to:
   • copy a forum or copy a topic to a different forum (Copy).
   • change the order in which the forums and topics are displayed (Reorder).
   • select topics and/or forums to delete (Delete).
   • restore deleted topics and/or forums (Restore).
3. Click Collapse All Forums to collapse all topics. This will provide you with a better overview of all the available forums in the course.
4. Click Settings to change the settings of the fora (Discussion Settings).

In the Discussions List, you can see an overview of all forums and topics as well as some of their properties.

1. If a forum or topic has a start date and end date, this is shown below the forum name. If you move your mouse over this, you can see how the forum/topic is accessible to students before the start date and after the end date.

2. If you have an assessment/grade linked to the topic, you will see Includes assessment here.
3. The number in the Threads column shows how many threads there are currently in the topic.
4. The number in the Posts column shows the number of posts. The blue number in brackets is the number of posts you have not yet opened.
5. Finally, under Last Post you can see which student last posted in the topic and when that was.

The Subscriptions tab shows you a list of the forums, topics, and threads to which you are currently subscribed to receive notifications.

You can use restrictions to assign fora and topics to certain groups. Only the students in this group will be able to see and use the intended forum or topic. An instructional video is included for this subject. A written manual can be found below the video.

1. Select for which group you want to see the restrictions for what forum.
2. Adjust the check marks if you want to grant/remove access to certain forums and/or topics.
3. Click on Save to save your adjustments.
4. Click on Automatically create restricted topics if you want to create topics in a forum that are only accessible to specific groups. The topics in the forum will automatically be named after the groups in the selected group category.

The Statistics tab allows you to see the statistics of the users of the forums and topics.

Users:

1. Below Org Unit Statistics you can see the total amount of posted threads and replies (Replies) and the total amount of unapproved posts.
2. Below User Statistics you can see the activities per student. Select whether you want to see the statistics of all the students or the statistics from a specific group behind View By. Then click on Apply. 
3. Click Export to CSV File to download the statistics as a CSV file (which can be opened in Excel).

Forums and Topics:

1. Below Org Unit Statistics you can see the total amount of posted threads and replies (Replies), the amount of pinned threads, and the amount of unapproved posts.
2. Below Forum and Topic Statistics you can see the activity per forum and topic.
3. Click on Export to CSV File to download the statistics as a CSV file (which can be opened in Excel).