Sadly this is not intuitive
To find these facilities you should use the menus to navigate to
" COMMUNITY > INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION > COMMUNICATIONS > GROUP PAGES"
Here you will find the links to forums and other stuff that is specific to your working group.
You should get started as soon as possible with the discussions, the students in NZ have a two week break and so there might not be too much contact before the 4th October. However, you can do the exercises that have to do with the evaluation of AUTonline as a product for supporting collaborative work and online distance education.
Certainly you can reuse the content of the lab exercise. I think that it is worthwhile to try to adjust your previous web page to suit the AUTonline system a little better, but don't spend too much time on it.
You should have a look at the detailed instructions for the next stage in the project description and also the phase two link in the project resources list.