How to work with discussions in TalentLMS

TalentLMS lets you and your users communicate with each other through discussions, a forum-like communication tool.

You can access all of your discussions and create new ones at any time when logged in as an Instructor (1), by clicking on the Discussions (2) icon from the toolbar on the right side of your screen, next to your profile image.

Discussions are enabled for all users by default. More specifically:

SuperAdmins, Administrators, and Instructors can create new discussions from their Instructor role.
Learners can create new discussions if the respective permission is enabled for their user type (read below).

To open a new discussion, follow these steps:

1. Sign in to your TalentLMS account as an Instructor (1).
2. From the Quick actions widget, click Add discussion (2).

Note: Alternatively, go to Discussions and click Add discussion.

3. On the New discussion (3) page, select an audience for your new topic. Choose among the following options:

Everybody can see this topic (i.e., everyone who logs in through the same URL, main or branch)
Only specific users can see this topic (i.e., users associated with a course or a group)
This is a private topic (i.e., only you can see this topic)

4. In the Subject field, type a title (4) about the topic of your discussion.
5. In the Message text area, type a description (5) to prompt discussion.
6. If necessary, upload an external file (6) to attach to your message. Users who reply to the topic can also add attachments. The maximum file size for attachments is 20MB.
7. Click Post (7) to publish your new discussion topic.

Notes:

The discussion editor includes limited formatting options, such as bold, italic, underline, links, and images. AI-assisted editing options are not available in discussions.
Emojis are not fully supported in Discussions. Although some emojis may display correctly, their behavior is not guaranteed, and they may not appear as expected after posting.
Discussion posts have a 5,000-character limit. When pasting formatted text from external sources, hidden formatting may affect the character limit. To avoid this, paste the content as plain text as described in this article.

You will be redirected to the Discussions (1) page, where you’ll see all of your discussion topics.

On this page, you can Sort (2) discussions by title (alphabetically), creation date, latest activity, or engagement.

A label (3) will appear next to the discussion topic and show the chosen audience of that discussion if specified (i.e., the name of the group or course you’ve selected for your discussion topic). The label is only visible to Instructor roles.

Click the Subscribe (4) icon next to your discussion topic to be notified each time a comment is made by other users on that topic. To unsubscribe, click the same button again.

Note: When a user is subscribed to a discussion topic, they will receive email notifications when users comment on the discussion.

How to let Learners initiate discussions

Learners can only start new discussions if a SuperAdmin or an Administrator assigns the relevant permissions to their user type.

Here's how:

1. Sign in to your TalentLMS account as an Administrator and go to Account & Settings > User types (1).
2. Hover over the user type you wish to edit, e.g., Learner-Type, and click Edit (2).

3. On the multi-level nested list, under the Learner tree, click Discussions (3) to expand the relevant list of permissions and make sure the Create (4) option is enabled.
4. Click Save to update the user type.