Use Discussion Board for student collaboration

[jmerriam]

I teach online public speaking (asynchronous), and one of the requirements for speech videos is for students to have an audience of 5 people. Some students can't gather that many people, and one idea was to set up a special Discussion Board where students could be audience members for fellow student's speech videos. Any idea how I could set this up, or if it's even possible?

[TrishaMeyer1]

I'm not sure what you mean by "special" Discussion Board. You can use a regular Discussion to do this. The original post as well as all the Replies have access to the Rich Content Editor, including the media recorder. The original speaker can post a recording, and other students can reply with text or their own recording or a number of other ways to respond. 

If you need the groups to be private (unable to access videos other than the one assigned to them), you can form course Groups and assign a Discussion to each Group individually.

You also could use the Peer Review feature on a regular Assignment. Each student can post a recording, and you can assign 5 Peer Reviewers to respond to that recording. Canvas can randomly assign Peer Reviewers or you can choose your own.

Which method you choose might depend on whether this option will be used by all students or just those who need to do it this way.

[jmerriam]

I understand what you're saying, Trish, but the issue is that the student speaker needs to show me their audience in the video (as if it were a Zoom meeting) in order for me to verify that they actually have an audience of 5 people; further, that audience needs to be watching the student live. I can set this up on Zoom, but one of my colleagues suggested using the DB.

[TrishaMeyer1]

I'm not sure because I don't use this feature, but you might be able to use conferences, if your institution has them enabled. Here is one of the guides for this feature; you can use the navigation buttons at the bottom to see more pages for this topic:

How do I create a conference in a course?