Discussion boards let learners and instructors talk through a course's content directly inside your academy — asking questions, sharing context, and replying to each other without leaving the course. Before your academy's learners and instructors can use discussion boards on any course, an academy admin needs to turn the feature on and decide how it's moderated.
Enabling Discussion Boards for Your Academy
In the left navigation, make sure you're in the Academy Workspace. Select Settings, then go to Training and select Courses.
Under Courses, select the toggle labeled Discussion boards in courses.
This setting is off by default. Turning it on makes the following available academy-wide:
- The two related academy notifications and the personal discussion-board notification (see Related Articles below)
- A course-level setting that lets you turn the discussion board on or off for each individual course
- The Discussion Board entry point on the course-about page (for learners and instructors) and in the Manage Course panel (for admins)
Turning the toggle back off hides all of the above again — it does not delete any existing discussion content, it simply becomes inaccessible until the setting is turned back on.
Requiring Approval Before Posts Go Public
Once Discussion boards in courses is on, a second toggle becomes available: All posts need admin approval to become public. This is off by default.
- Off (default): posts and replies are published to the discussion board immediately.
- On: a new post or reply is held in a pending state until an admin, training manager, or course creator approves or declines it from the course's Discussion Board page. Approved posts become visible to everyone with access to the course; declined posts are not published. This setting also applies to edits (see below).
Allowing Learners to Edit Their Own Posts
A third toggle, also available once Discussion boards in courses is on, controls whether people can edit their own discussion posts and replies after publishing them: Team members can edit their thread posts.
- When it's on, anyone can edit the posts and replies they wrote. When it's off, posts and replies can't be edited once published.
Note: each of these three settings is academy-wide. To control whether a specific course has a discussion board at all, use the course-level Discussion board setting instead — see Related Articles below.