Forums are the basic collaboration and communication tool in a Moodle course. Many people are familiar with web forums; most popular news sites have comment sections with reply capabilities attached to their news stories. Moodle's forums are threaded discussions, which is a fancy way of saying you can keep them organized by discussion topics.

You may have noticed there is already a forum in the course you just created. Moodle creates a special News Forum by default. This forum only allows teachers to create posts, and is meant as a place to post course announcements.

Beyond simply distributing course news, forums can be used for discussing learning activities, be the learning activity, or for general collaboration within a community of practice.