Reply with Quote

[StevenLewis]

I ask students a series of open-ended questions about their lab assignments. On Blackboard I post these to the discussion board and have the students reply with quote to my questions. I then go through their reply and comment on each answer as necessary. I don't see any reply with quote feature in Canvas. I guess the only way I could do this is have students copy my series of questions about the lab, paste them in a reply thread where they answer each question. Then I would have to copy their reply so I could give them feedback on each answer.

What a nightmare.

[igustafson · Accepted solution]

Hello @StevenLewis ,

I will be happy to help with this. So with the new discussion redesign, you can quote others posts by following the steps here https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Discussions-Announcements/Canvas-Release-Discussions-Announcement... If you don't have the new discussion option turned on you can find it under course settings and then feature options.

[StevenLewis]

I activated the Discussion feature, got the green check, but it made no difference. No "Quote" or "reply with quote" option in either Firefox or Chrome.

[mzimmerman]

Hi @StevenLewis 

In my testing with the new discussion design, I didn't get the quote option in the first reply to a topic, but for posts after that, there was a "Quote" link to include the previous post:

When you click the "Quote" button and made a post, the result looks like this:

[StevenLewis]

What is the logic behind allowing a quoted reply to subsequent posts but not to the initial post? If an instructor is posting a series of questions for the students to provide open-ended answers it is useful to have the question quoted with the answer for ease of instructor evaluation and feedback. You don't want to have the instructor and the students to scroll back and forth between a student's reply and the list of questions. I can see a couple of workarounds. The instructor could have the students copy and then paste the questions in their reply and then answer them. Or an instructor could post the questions, then reply to the initial post, copying the questions into the reply and have the students use the instructor's reply to reply with quote. It seems bizarre that one should have to jump through these extra hoops because the designers didn't understand why an instructor would need reply with quote to an initial discussion board posting.

[mzimmerman]

I can't speculate why the "quote" is not an option on the initial post, just pointing out that there is indeed a "quote" option.

[StevenLewis]

I'm afraid the reply with quote feature in Canvas, such as it is, does not work the same as Blackboard's. In Blackboard "reply with quote" includes the quoted material within the followup post so that the instructor's questions are the student's answers are together. In Canvas the quoted material is separated from the student's reply, like a separate thread. Why anyone would design a reply with quote feature like this is a mystery wrapped in a riddle. The only workaround would be to have the study copy the instructor's questions and paste them into their reply, where they can answer each question.

[mshepcsuchico]

Yes indeed confusing functionality in "enhanced" discussions with Canvas 

[mshepcsuchico]

Totally agree. This is super confusing design