Also within the What's New area, we find Blogs, Discussion Board, and Gradebook:

A course can have a blog for all of the students in a course. It can also have a blog for each group of students within the course. And, each student can have his/her individual blog. You will learn more about blogs in Chapter 5, Blogs and Wikis, and about working with groups in Chapter 8,Working with Groups.

By default, there is a discussion board for a course. Under this board, there are forums. Forums are composed of threads, which are composed of posts written by the course participants. In some Learning Management Systems, there can be multiple forums spread throughout the course. In Blackboard, the Discussion Board page puts all of the coursewide forums in one place, as shown in the following screenshot:

The instructor can add links to the individual forums throughout the course. As a result, the student has two ways to get to the forum that (s)he is looking for. The student can go to the Discussion Board page and click on Forum, or the student can use a direct link to the forum, which was created by the instructor.

Blackboard offers similar functionalities for blogs and wikis. It collects them all on a Blogs or Wikis page, and also enables the instructor to add a link to an individual blog or wiki throughout the course.