This area can be used to include information about the purpose or goal of the topic. If you attach the topic to the Content of the course, this description will be visible there.

Indicate what general options you want to have accounted for.

• Allow anonymous posts; the option to have users respond to your discussion anonymously
• A moderator must approve individual posts before they display in the topic; install an extra review step to monitor individual responses and filter out those responses that you find to be irrelevant
• Users must start a thread before they can read and reply to other threads; allow students to only start up a thread once they have shown activity in the threads of others

Assign a value and order to the posts that are sent in. There are four options for rating:

• No Ratings; choose this option if you want to have the posts equally valued
• Five-Star Rating Scheme; user posts can score on a scale 1-5, 5 points being the highest score that a post can receive
• Up Vote/Down Vote Rating Scheme; enable users to influence post ratings by a system of both up- and downward voting
• Up Vote Only Rating Scheme; enable users to increase a post's rating by a system of upward voting

You have the option to hide the topic from the users. You can do so by ticking the Selectbox.

The default setting when you are creating a topic is for the topic to be visible.

The next optional setting that appears in your menu is Availability:

• Has Start Date - you can set a start date and time for the topic
• Has End Date - you can set an end date and time for the topic
• Display in Calendar - you can select whether you want these availability dates to appear in the course Calendar

The last menu in the Properties tab is Locking Options:

• Unlock topic - choose this option if you want to have the topic always free for your students.
• Lock topic- lock the topic for your students. This way they are now not able to enter/respond to the topic.
• Unlock topic for a specific date range - if you want the topic only to be accessible for a certain period, you can click this option and set a start and end date.

You can choose a condition by which the topic will be released to your students.

Attach existing release conditions to the discussion forum, or create a new one in this tab. By adding release conditions, you for example have the option to only make available the discussion forum to those students that already finished another task.

• If you have already created Release Conditions and want to simply add those to the Discussion Forum, click on Attach Existing
• If you do not already have Release Conditions, click on Create and Attach
• If, after setting up the Release Conditions, you do not want to have them installed after all, click Remove All Conditions

You are able to release a certain discussion forum to a specific target group only, thus specifying your audience based on the discussion forum subject. This may be a convenient feature when you have multiple groups that are all working on a different topic.

• If you want to have the group restriction enabled, click on Restrict this forum to the following groups and sections and select the preferred group by clicking on Add groups and Sections

Choose from the list of grade items you already have created or create a new grade item for the topic directly from this point.

Add a Score Out Of if you wish to have a specific grading scale for the activity in this topic.

You can attach a Rubric to a topic for the evaluation, or you can create one for this topic directly from this point.

View a video on how to attach a rubric to a discussion topic here.

In this field you can select how you are going to evaluate the posts in the topic. Selecting the option Allow assessment of individual posts allows instructors to assess posts in the topic. Each user's topic score is calculated using the method selected from the Calculation drop-down list:

• Average post score
• Maximum post score
• Minimum post score
• Mode post score - Hightest on multiple
• Mode post score - Lowest on multiple
• Sum of post scores

If you select one of these you will be able to edit the option Include unassessed posts in the calculated topic score as zero. Selecting this option will include unassessed posts in the topic score calculation as zero. If this option is not selected, unassessed posts will not be included in the topic score calculation.