An instructor can choose to create a discussion forum within a course. Both instructors and students can start threads and post responses in the forum; instructors can make a thread sticky, delete posts, or block a student from the forum. The ACE forum is more useful than other readily available discussion tools because, in addition to text, a post may include a MarvinJS drawing, a LewisJS drawing, or an image.
The forum is intimately linked with the assignment questions. Each question on the assignment questions page has associated with it a Start forum topic button. A user who presses this button and begins a thread on the forum links the new thread to the question. Thereafter, the forum will have a link from the thread back to the question on the assignment questions page, and the assignment questions page will show a Go to forum topic button. This feature allows easy movement between a forum thread about a problematic question and the question itself. If a user has included a Marvin or LewisJS drawing with his or her post, another user can copy that drawing, go back to the question linked to the thread, paste the response onto the drawing canvas, and submit it to see how ACE responds.