The Announcements Forum is a special forum for general news and announcements. A course may only have one Announcements Forum unless it has been imported from another system which supports more than one Announcements Forum.

This forum is automatically created in a new course. By default, it is placed in first section of the course, only teachers and users with appropriate permissions (by default teachers) can post in it. The forum has forced subscription set by default.

The Latest announcements block displays a specific number of recent discussions from the Announcements Forum.

Removing Announcements #

There are three ways you can remove an Announcement forum.

Method #1 – Hiding the Announcement forum

Hiding the Announcement forum rather than deleting it can be helpful in case it is needed in the future to make an announcement or update to course participants. To hide an Announcement forum from students, click on the three dots icon beside the Announcements Forum. This will open the actions menu. Click on the Hide button to hide this forum. This will keep the forum hidden from students.

Method #2 – Deleting the Announcement forum

This method is not recommended because once the Announcement forum is deleted and removed from the recycle bin, it is difficult to retrieve it. To delete an Announcement forum, click on the three dots icon beside the Announcements Forum. This will open the actions menu. Click on the ‘Delete’ button to delete this forum.

Method #3 – Disabling the Announcement forum from course setting

This method allows you to remove the Announcement forum from course setting. The forum will be disabled from the course, but can be added back in future if desired. To remove Announcement forum, navigate to Course settings go to Advanced settings, under Appearance tab set “Number of announcements” to 0. To restore Announcements set the “Number of announcements” to a number greater than 0.

Stop the auto-creation of Announcements by default #

As a Site administrator, it is possible to set the “Number of announcements” to 0 in Course default settings, which means that an Announcements Forum will not automatically be added to new courses. That can be overridden in individual courses.