It just depends what you want really I suppose. You can give feedback with forums too as the teacher can add a comment but with the online text assignment a student can't (easily) attach a file or an image, but you might not need to do that. It is certainly a lot quicker to set up the online text assignment but then with a forum you can have an on-going "conversation" /reflection area with the student that is recorded in the forum thread rather than the online text which doesn't lend itself as well to that.
Journal (plugin)
Private Journals
This discussion has been locked so you can no longer reply to it.