[Discussions] Grading Discussion in the Discussion Stream

[lmielke]

I often use the Discussion feature as a Do Now activity for students in my classes. I try and reward students with points for participating in the discussions daily. Sometime going through the Speedgrader to grade these can be a longer process than what is necessary. I think if we could somehow include a grading box right along in the student stream where they post, it would be much easier to read replies, ensure student understanding, as well as saving time to grade students 1 by 1.

[biray]

Interesting idea,  @lmielke ​. Can you not just have two browser tabs open while grading? One with Speedgrader and one with the discussion thread? Looking forward to your thoughts.

[lmielke]

I had never thought of that. I just think the easiest and most convenient would to be able to just scroll through discussion posts and put a grade on the post right then and there. I'm sure that would be the next easiest step. Maybe instead of the Speedgrader, because you have to manually switch through every student, it should just be the gradebook open in another window. Good idea.

[lmielke]

 @biray ​, I recently tried your suggestion. It was much quicker than trying to go through the Speedgrader, but at the same time, I had to find every student in the Gradebook in order to type in their grade. I think this idea could be worth looking into. It'd be so easy to grade it in the stream and have that go straight to the Gradebook rather than having to read and find a student every single time.

[biray]

 @lmielke ​ - Glad to hear the work-around is sufficient for now. Since you are still interested in pursuing your original idea, it will be open for vote in the next voting period.

[biray]

This idea is now open for voting.

[dtheriault]

If you use discussions often this is a crucial feature. It takes so much time bouncing back and forth. Either let me drop a number grade to the right of the discussion, or let me make a public reply to their discussion post while still in the speedgrader.

[zgriffin]

I have my students post in threads and ideally, respond to each other. Reading the posts in SpeedGrader destroys the continuity. Please just let me read the discussion posts once  - in the threads (in the order they were posted) - and give them credit. I never thought I would miss a feature of Blackboard but I find it incredible that this is even an issue for this app.

[echen]

I'm raising my hand on this one as well. It would also be nice to use the reporting features to find out X number of times a student has posted and maybe a listing of all their discussion posts. With this view, a teacher can easily grade responds by student and not just by discussion thread.

[kself]

I was told that my idea was present within this thread, so I am copying and posting my submitted idea into the comments here, along with pictures from Moodle that illustrate what I hope to accomplish with this:

I am a new Canvas user, transitioning from Moodle.  One of the reasons I prefer a LMS to something like Google Classroom is because of the fully functional discussion board features.  I am frustrated with the lack of ease of grading discussion posts in Canvas as compared to Moodle however.  In Moodle, a drop down number key allowed me to rate each post in a discussion board next to the post itself.  This allowed me to read original posts and comments to others in the flow of the discussion board itself.  When students are responding to others in a threaded discussion, seeing all of their posts in the Speed Grader gives me a disjointed look at the conversation.  Having to flip back and forth between the speed grader and the discussion is an exercise in frustration and is time-consuming.  I would really love to have a rating button that coordinates to the gradebook available right in the discussion forum itself.  Pictures from Moodle below.  This feature dramatically increases my ability to assess student discussion posts.

[macaulayl]

As  I have never used Moodle, I appreciated your screen shots.  This would be awesome.  I use a rubric for discussions and this would allow me to rate each post per the rubric, and then the grade is an average of my ratings.  That would be awesome!  I can see where others would not want to get that granular, but having the option would be useful.