Threaded Discussions allow students to interact with the instructor and other classmates and allow multiple posts and replies. New posts appear in the Course Activity Stream page, so you will know when something has been posted.
In general, questions and comments about project assignments and course content should be shared with the entire class via the discussion forums. That way, everyone can benefit from the discussion.
Please note that in the discussion forum's default mode, it is very difficult to keep track of whether you've read a post or not. To override the default mode setting, perform the following steps:
1. Use the Discussions link in the main menu to open a view of all discussion forums.
[If the Discussions link is not available in the main menu (it is visible in some courses and not in others), simply enter any discussion forum, find the Discussions link at the top of the page, and click the link. Proceed to step 2.]
2. Click on the gear/cog icon in the upper right to open the Edit Discussions Settings dialog.
3. Under My Settings, check the box to Manually mark posts as read, and then click the Save Settings button.
4. After you've changed the default settings, you can click on the blue dots to the left of discussion posts to more easily keep track of what you have and haven't read.