Changing the forum type from qanda to general..en mass

My customer today said, "the students can't respond in the forums".  After a little investigation what we found is that the student role cannot start a conversation thread in the forum type qanda.

We have courses this year from Edynamic, in which they use the forum type qanda instead of general. In the general forum type, the student role, by default, can start a new thread.

We looked first to see if there was a permission in the student role for the qanda forum type, but we did not find the permission that would allow the student to start a conversation thread, only respond.

We verified that the student role could start a discussion in the general forum, we saw the permission set to Allow for the student role in that forum type.  I browsed Site Admin | Users | Permissions | Define roles and clicked on the edit icon next to student.

Browsing down the long list of permissions we find this set to allow.

Once we verified that changing the forum type from qanda to general resulted in a Add new discussion topic,

I proceeded to how to update the rest of the forums in the 25 other courses.  Using MySQL Workbench, I browsed to the moodle DB and opened the mdl_forum table and queried for types = 'qanda' and found about 700 records. 

I then used an update statement like this

USE dbname

UPDATE table name

SET type = 'general'

WHERE type = 'qanda' AND course = courseid

once that worked for all the forums in one course, I updated the where clause, removing the AND course = courseid, updating the rest of the forums.