
In a Q and A forum, students are required to post a reply to the question posted by the facilitator before they are able to see any of the posts made by their peers. This can be useful for graded forums where you want everyone to post their own work before they encounter the work of other students.
When you set up a Q and A forum, you usually want to put generic instructions about how to complete the forum at the top, not the actual content of the question. In Q and A forums, the facilitator has to post the actual text of the question each time the course is offered. This is another way to increase teacher presence in the course since it means that the facilitator’s picture and a timestamp appear next to the question (see the screenshot below). However, as a course designer, you need to be aware that the text of the question that the facilitator posts will be removed from the course along with all of the student data any time a new copy of the course is created.

Because the facilitator’s post is removed from the course, if you want the text of the discussion question to be copied along with the course, you will need to create a copy of the question text somewhere else. Horizon’s method for doing this is to create a section at the end of each course that is hidden from students but visible to the facilitator. We usually call this final section “Teacher Documents.” When Horizon designs a course, we create a Moodle book in the hidden Teacher Documents section to house the text of any Q and A forum questions that will be used in the course. We usually create a page for each forum and put the text of the questions there. Facilitators can then go to that book to copy the text of each question that they need to post and paste it into the appropriate forum as they set up their individual course.
You could also include the text of your Q and A forum questions in a Word document and hide the file or put the file in a section that is hidden from students. Whatever method you choose, we recommend that you find a way to include the text of the discussion questions for the facilitator somewhere in the course whenever you use Q and A forums.