One of the primary needs of an online education platform is the need for a discussion forum.

A discussion forum is similar to Quora but different in that there is only one thread of answers/comments for each question.

So in terms of an educational portal a discussion forum is a place where the students post their queries from the lectures that they have attended. On a discussion forum, a new student can ideally find most of the common queries. These queries are mostly answered by the teachers for their previous students.

Why build a discussion forum when we can integrate one of the best open-source discussion forum for you

Discourse as described in there words:

Discourse is a from-scratch reboot, an attempt to reimagine what a modern Internet discussion forum should be today, in a world of ubiquitous smartphones, tablets, Facebook, and Twitter.

Discourse provides a set of API that can help you to build the discussion forum. Since it is an open-source application, It can be easily extended to suit your personal needs.

How we integrated Discourse in our React-based education platform

The complete application is composed of two separate applications:
One is the learning platform and the other is the discussion platform i.e., Discourse.

Since discord is a separate application we used the concept of SSO (Single Sign-On) to sign in to our whole application.

Once discourse is integrated we made styling modifications to the forum so that moving over to it should be seamless.