Discussion Forums are a way for you to communicate with your students and for your students to communicate with each other. There are several different functions that are available with discussion forums. The most popular discussion forum used is to have students discuss a prompt and each other's answers to that prompt.
There are five forum types to choose from:
A single simple discussion - A single topic discussion developed on one page, which is useful for short focused discussions (cannot be used with separate groups)
Each person posts one discussion - Each person can post exactly one new discussion topic (everyone can reply to them though); this is useful when you want each student to start a discussion about, say, their reflections on the week's topic, and everyone else responds to these
Q and A Forum - Instead of initiating discussions participants pose a question in the initial post of a discussion. Students may reply with an answer, but they will not see the replies of other Students to the question in that discussion until they have themselves replied to the same discussion.
Standard forum displayed in a blog-like format
Standard forum for general use - An open forum where anyone can start a new topic at any time; this is the best general-purpose forum
For more details on how to use Discussion Forums in Moodle, click the link below to access the Faculty Documentation in Moodle.
https://moodle.cobleskill.edu/course/view.php?id=15036§ion=8#tabs-tree-start