In discussions, you can share thoughts and ideas about class materials. In Blackboard Learn, course members can have the thoughtful discussions that take place in the traditional classroom, but with the advantages of asynchronous communication. Participants don't need to be in the same location or time zone, and you can take the time to consider your responses carefully.

Learn more (students): https://help.blackboard.com/Learn/Student/Interact/Discussions

Learn more (instructors): https://help.blackboard.com/Learn/Instructor/Interact/Discussions

Transcript:
Discussions allow you to share thoughts and ideas. Let’s take a look.
The main discussion board page provides a global view of all available forums. You can search for posts, see how many posts are in each forum, and jump to a collection of unread posts.
Select a forum to view its threads. A thread includes an original post and all of its replies. Instructors, and students, if they're allowed by the instructor, can create threads. Students do not see this button if the instructor has not allowed student thread creation for this forum
Select an existing thread's title to view its posts and reply to them.
You can expand or collapse all posts. If you like to start with all posts collapsed, you can expand them one at a time. Point just below a post's subject line and select Expand.
When you point to the thread page, the Search and Refresh buttons appear at the top. You'll want to refresh the thread page to see posts that were submitted since you accessed the page.
The number of posts displays at the top of the thread. Selecting the unread number displays only unread posts. Expanded posts are marked as read automatically as you scroll down the page. Select the indicator to manually change the post's status. You can also flag posts that you want to review again later or mark as important.
To perform actions on a group of posts, select the checkboxes, and choose from the Message Actions menu at the top of the page. You can mark as read, flag, or collect posts to view them on one page and then filter or print the list.
When you point to a post, the reply, quote, and email author functions appear. For instructors, the edit and delete functions are also available. Students can edit or delete their own posts only if the instructor has enabled those settings.
Select Reply to contribute to the discussion. The content editor allows you to format text, embed media, and attach files.
A reply to the initial post appears at the bottom of the list. If you reply to a subsequent post, your post appears indented beneath the message you are replying to.
Point to the age of the post to view its creation date and its number of views.
And finally, if the instructor enabled the rating feature for the forum, you can see the average rating for a post. When you point to the rating area, it changes to show Your Rating, where you can give the post a rating.