[Discussions] Allow teachers to subscribe to a group discussion

[Laura_Orsetti]

Our faculty would like to be able to subscribe to the group discussions in their course so they can follow along, be alerted when a student posts something new, post feedback, and keep discussions on track.

(This was originally submitted by Brandon Pousley, but did not receive enough votes to move forward.  I was hoping this time it would get more votes.)

[fervin]

Mr Thomas, pls give details as to what the discussion is about. Is there a concern for safety in reference to the virus?

[mathomas]

It's nothing related to health concerns. It's a discussion that touches on some elements of feminist readings of the Bible, and I have a student who is being quite dismissive of some of the female students.

[sarah_dearling]

Hello Canvas community
We've just run a course with 450 students split in 45 discussion groups, with group facilitators (teachers) allocated to 3 or 4 groups each. The facilitators role is to guide discussions within each group and, as you can imagine, this is tricky to do if they're not notified of posts - the facilitators are all busy folk and it's impractical to expect them to keep logging in to check whether anyone has added to the discussion. Notifications would be the solution.

[Nancy_Webb_CCSF]

We have multiple Q&A discussions in a very large course (more than one course actually). Because there are so many posts, there would be pages to scroll through, so to help students we made them group discussions. The drawback is that as a teacher I am not notified if there is a new question posted.  I want to subscribe to all groups' discussions so I'll know when to go in and reply.  I don't want to be constantly looking at each group discussion in multiple courses to see if there is a new post. Yes I only have to look at the main course discussion to see if there are unread posts in any of its groups, but that still means I have to regularly remember to go look, and click on each course and its discussions to see if there's something new.

It would seem it might not be too difficult to make the subscribe button available to teachers in a group's discussion. Don't think I'd need to be a group member.  This would allow different teachers to be assigned to different groups, they'd only subscribe to the ones they're involved in. Please! 

[ngugliucci]

Can we get a little more love for this suggestion with the increase in remote learning? 

I'll be honest, I need notifications to remind me to check. And I've found small groups way better for discussion dynamics than the whole class. So why isn't this a thing?

[Nancy_Webb_CCSF]

This idea has been here since 2016, but unfortunately since all our votes were lost when the community changed websites, there are very few 5 star votes at this time.  Only one, then I voted, now 2.  Please re-vote this idea!

It should be an option to add teachers, TAs, and other roles to a group.

When a new group set is created, and students are to be automatically assigned, I think teachers, TAs and other roles should not be included at that time.  They should be in a special category that can be included in more than one group.

Thank you for re-voting.  I am going to try and find all the ideas I previously voted for.

[fteti]

I concur with the others promoting this suggestion.

[eprendergas2]

This really needs to be a feature. In my course of 230 students, students are split into groups for a graded discussions. This feature would help instructors in our course follow and assess discussion. 

[dbesch]

I think this is a great idea that would allow students to get the same quality feedback with online discussions as they do in person

[lucastruble]

As an instructor, I need certain discussions to take place in groups. In some of those discussions, students would greatly benefit from very quick replies. Being able to subscribe to group discussions would be extremely helpful.