Managing course-wide general discussions in Open edX

The discussion forums are a great way for students and instructors to engage in a conversation with one another. A lot of the time these discussion are about specific course material, but sometimes they're more general, broad discussions. Each course automatically comes with a "General" discussion forum, but if you would like to add more course-wide discussions for things like "Help" or "Feedback," it can be a little tricky. Hopefully this will clear things up:

From edX Studio, navigate to Advanced Settings via the Settings dropdown menu. 

Next, scroll down to the section titled Discussion Topic Mapping

This is where you manage course-wide discussion topics. If you would like to add an additional course-wide topic, simply copy the three lines of code from "General" to "}" and paste them on a line below. 

IMPORTANT: Be sure you add a comma after the first "}," Otherwise edX will not save your changes. 

Then, you'll want to change the name of the discussion. We'll use "Help" This could be a section where students can just ask general questions about anything they need help on. 

Next, be sure you append some unique identifier at the end of the "id", usually the name of the topic works great. 

Be sure to hit save, and you've done it! Your new discussion topic can be found in the discussion tab.