SpeedGrader in New Discussion Redesign Issue

[RyanSobeck]

While testing the New Discussion Redesign in Beta, I was in the SpeedGrader and noticed that when I switch to grade a user with multiple posts in the discussion, the SpeedGrader highlights only one of their posts, and that highlight appears to be the first post in the thread that the SpeedGrader finds. In this instance, a reply to another student was the post highlighted, rather than the user's top-level response.

When I scrolled down further, I found the user's actual reply to the thread, and not just their first response in the discussion that I would find if I opened every thread chain.

This is a major issue as faculty will likely miss important contributions from their students because the Speedgrader is no longer displaying all of a user's contributions together for them to review.

I will also add three other notes in my experience of working through this:

1. The experience of the ENTIRE thread interface loading into the Speedgrader (interface buttons and all) and then the thread auto-scrolling down to the posts is very disorienting. I have a test thread with maybe 5 posts in it and I can only imagine how wild this will look when there is a thread with 40 or 50+ posts and the page is flying down to a post 
   1. I will also add on to this post that the highlight on the post it takes you to goes away after about 5 seconds... I'm not sure why the highlight disappears or why it only highlights one post from a user. 
2. You can use the "Search" function in the thread's iframe display to find and see all the posts from a single user so you don't miss anything... but then what's the point of using the SpeedGrader to select a specific user if it's not going to do that sorting for me anyways. This is not intuitive as I selected the person I want to grade--I should not also need to filter to that user's comments in the interface, especially when I never needed to do this in the past discussion speedgrader before.
3. The "Split Scree" vs. "Inline" view does not seem to work unless you select "Split Screen" and then click to go to a new user in the speedgrader--but even that is not intuitive and still misses all of a user's contributions, though it did show me their first top-level comment first.

Please, before this rolls out in July, get the SpeedGrader functionality sorted.

[erik_gustafson]

I was playing around with this in Beta as well. I did notice that the entire discussion loaded. It would be difficult to sort out all of the students' contributions if you see all the posts.

However, I do like the ability to view the discussion prompt at the top. It's hard for me to remember exactly what the prompt was when grading and any specific guidelines. So, I have to open the discussion in another tab and constantly go back and forth. This seems like a move forward regarding having the prompt load in SpeedGrader.

[RyanSobeck]

Yeah, I do appreciate the prompt being there--that is convenient, though the experience of auto-scrolling all the way down is very disorienting, and the loss of the blue highlight makes scrolling back up to view my prompt again if I need to reference it kind of a moot point because now I will struggle to find the prompt(s) I am assessing. Keeping the blue highlights on all posts by the student I am grading, or auto-sorting so only the posts by that student are displayed in context would make the grading experience more user friendly.

[canvas_admin]

This is definitely a step back from classic discussions where all posts by a particular student displayed in Speedgrader with the option link to go to the entire discussion.  I would love for this functionality to be retained in Discussions ReDesign.

[hesspe]

I appreciated having my attention drawn to this.  I did a little bit of testing and my observations are:

- It is true that when you bring up a student's page in SpeedGrader, it is their first post, which can be a reply to another student rather than their reply to the topic that appears in the SpeedGrader viewport and is highlighted.  It might argue for encouraging people to use the "Users must post before seeing replies" option, but ideally the student's primary post should always be on top.

However, if, when you are on the SpeedGrader page for the student you are grading and, in the discussions interface you search for the student who you are grading: 

- In my testing it always  put their primary post (their reply to the topic) at the top of the SpeedGrader viewport

- You immediately see all of that student's posts, their primary post and all of their replies, in the SpeedGrader viewport

- in that student's replies, if you click Go to reply at the bottom of one of the replies, you then see that reply in context, that is along with the message the student was replying too. 

If you want to grade on all of the students contributions in the topic, which seems like the right way to evaluate their work, and if you master this workflow, the SpeedGrader grading process actually seems to me to be an improvement in the Redesign.  

But I agree that it would be better if this were the case immediately rather than to have to first use the search, which is non intuitive and feels awkward. (Having to search for the student you've just selected in SpeedGrader doesn't appear to make a lot of sense.)

The discussions redesign is really a top-to-bottom overhaul.  The discussion board format, not just in Canvas, but in implementations across the internet, has (IMO) had many deficiencies.   There is a lot of innovative thinking in the redesign that I think is commendable, but, I think we won't fully understand the benefits and pain points until it is rolled out on a large scale. Then the ultimate test will be how quickly Canvas is able to address the problems that will almost certainly be fiercely brought to their attention after July 20.    

[RyanSobeck]

@hesspe I agree with everything you're saying here. The resulting return of a "Search" is actually very good and I really like the "Go to Reply" button that can show the response in context if it is a sub-reply to other users.

I took a screenshot for those who want to see what we mean by this.

I really think that if selecting the user in the Speedgrader would automatically apply this Search filter in the discussion forum we'd be in much better shape.

I do have a little nitpick here that I would like to see updated hopefully as well, which is just distinguishing the top-level response / if there are other sub-comments to view. So for instance, in the image I shared above, the "Go to Reply" button opens up and shows Tester05 is a reply to someone else's post. I can see that comment, and I can also click a button (not shown in this image) "View Replies" to see the other replies that come off of Tester05 by other people.

The other reply that the search results came back with is the top response here and also the actual response to the discussion prompt. That reply ALSO has the words "Go to Reply" which opens the side menu with just that reply displayed, but no one actually has replied to this post so there is nothing to see. It feels odd that you would click a "Go to Reply" button when there are no replies to view and will create situations where faculty need to click the "Go to Reply" button for every post to ensure they aren't potentially missing other student comments that may be in response that they want to consider. If there are no replies off of the top-level comment, then perhaps there should not be a button like this. Or to @erik_gustafson point, if you click the "Go to Reply" button and perhaps the actual discussion prompt is displayed as this post is a reply to that prompt then maybe we get to maintain that experience.

[SamGarza1 · Accepted solution]

Hi Everyone! 

I want to apologize for any concern we caused with this change. We were working to resolve the issue of the entirety of Canvas opening within Speedgrader when either the link to the individual post or the overall discussion thread was clicked by moving an improvement forward. We ended up sending it out too soon and without the navigation buttons that would allow an instructor to navigate to a student's next post easily. We've reverted the change and will work to ensure something like this won't happen again.