@ mentions in Discussion forums

[hollands]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

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You have a class of 30 and there are three Tom's, how can we differentiate who we are talking to?

[edwige_simon]

It's time to implement this feature, it is a standard on social media sites for a reason and has multiple pedagogical benefits for teachers and students. 

[heather_stockfo]

A much needed feature!

I can @someone in the community, so I expect to be able to tag(@) a student in my class, it could be so helpful!

We have a like button, but it makes more sense to me that the @ feature was released first....taggin and likes are standard social media components.

Please vote this up

[tricia]

Harmonize Discussion is an external tool that you can plug in to Canvas and supports @mentions when adding a post or comment.  

Edu App Center 

https://tryharmonize.42lines.net 

[edwige_simon]

This would be a great feature, it’s way overdue, let’s make it happen!

[schexnayderk]

Hi everyone, 

Reposting what I put in my feature idea request-- which included a request for hashtags as well:

"It would be useful if we could tag/"@" other users in the course on discussion board posts and use hashtags/# like users can do on social media platforms--and even in this site (EX:Ideas, Canvas Developers, share discussion feature ideas)

For instance--

• when a question has been answered elsewhere on a board or thread. "brcc support, does the post above answer this question?
• to call a student's attention to another post with similar or different ideas to get discussions going in a different direction. "Hey Lenora White, what do you think of Susan Nealy's point about Intellectual Property in the classroom?"
• Helping people find related information. "textbooks, midterms, etc."

[james10]

730843 makes such an important point. It's important to know that our students will see posts we think will be helpful to them. It's ironic that the Canvas Community has @Mention but Canvas discussions in the actual classes that Canvas exists to support do not.

Teeka

[mader]

YES! Please, in the visual arts, we need @username mention AND notification functionality when using the Discussion Boards as an asynchronous work-in-progress critique environment. In the studio arts, we try to use the discussion boards to simulate work-in-progress and final critiques that happen regularly in face-to-face classes. In a F2F critique, you have a common space where work is hung/laid out in the studio space and discussed as a group. In the online environment, individual discussion boards can be the “common space” for the class where work gets “hung” (shared visually, by embedding images), then it’s being discussed live via Zoom with those who can attend, then via written post replies for those who cannot attend the live Zoom session. We need to get as close to a live conversation as we can, and student need to know when someone else (including the professor) is commenting about their work, even on when in replies to others’s posts. Then students need automatic notifications that they‘ve been mentioned so that they see the comments that someone took the time to provide.

[jdick1]

Heh. Because the Community is built in Jive, not an Instructure product. Still your point stands: Instructure recognizes the importance of this feature for an online learning community but hasn't implemented it their own product.

[atschrag]

PLEASE!! We need @mentions. I'm normally a face-to-face instructor using Canvas, and now I'm an online student on Canvas learning about online. What's the point of a discussion board in 2020 if you can't @ someone?????

[ryann_craig]

I'm just adding to the madness here because it apparently takes five years to do something so basic it is literally a feature of this forum ( @Chris_Hofer ‌). I have also raised this repeatedly with my institution. 

Why students and instructors need the @ Mention and # Tag function on Canvas Discussion boards: 

My students will be in smaller discussion groups, likely 5-7 in a group. In each group, I require (1) a response to the prompt, (2) replies to two classmates, (3) one response to one of the replies.  Thus, they do not need to receive the notifications for all of those posts -- and I would strongly prefer them not to get burned out on notifications and ignore them all, which they will -- but they should receive notifications for the replies to them so that they can respond.

In addition, not being able to thread together concepts from multiple classmates is a HUGE hindrance to actual discussion, which should be the whole point of a discussion board. Let's say student A is reading through the six other posts in her group, deciding who to reply to. She sees that student D and student E make similar points in their posts but that they are coming from completely different starting points. She wants to draw them into conversation with each other -- as one might do in a classroom. Why can't she @ mention student D in her reply to student E and vice versa? "Hey @Jane, did you see that @John agrees with you on x and y, but starts with presupposition b instead of a? What do you think is going on there?" 

Or, what if the students want to draw ME into the conversation for clarification? I need to be able to prioritize responding to that thread rather than reading through 85 posts before I get to it. 

It baffles me that this is not a feature.