Visibility on group discussions on Canvas

[FotiosGkouvas]

Hello team

I am not a student. I was wondering if I create a discussion on a course and then set it as group discussion for a specific group of students, let's call it group A then:

• Will the rest of the students not in group A be able to see the discussion?
• If they are able, how much content will they be able to see?

Thank you

[Chris_Hofer · Accepted solution]

Hi there, @FotiosGkouvas ...

So I did some testing in my own sandbox course.  I created a new Group Set via the "People" page of my course, and then I created only one Group within the Group Set.  I then put a dummy student in that Group.  I had one additional dummy student enrolled in the course, but I did not put that dummy student in a Group.  I also created a group discussion topic based on that Group Set.  When I logged in as the first dummy student, it looked like I could reply to the topic, but it wasn't going to the group's discussion...but rather to the main discussion.  I logged out of the first dummy student and then logged in as the second dummy student (the one that was not in a group).  I could see the first dummy student's posting.

Then, I decided to create a second group in the Group Set, and then I put the second dummy student in that second Group Set.  When I logged in as the first dummy student, I was still replying to the main discussion topic, and it was not posting to the Group discussion.  But, when I logged in to the second dummy student's account, I was not able to see the first dummy student's responses.

I'd encourage you to try this out yourself, too.  You can do that in a couple different ways:

• If you have a "sandbox" course in your Canvas environment to play with, you could set up the scenario with a couple dummy student accounts (provided that your school's Canvas admin would allow this...check with that person).
• You could set this up in your "test" or "beta" Canvas environments.  These are separate Canvas environments compared to your school's normal "production" environment that you log in to on a daily basis.  Just be sure you log out of "test" or "beta" before logging back in to "production".  And, of course, you'd still need dummy student accounts to try this out, I believe.
  • What is the Canvas beta environment?
  • What is the Canvas test environment?
  • How do I access the Canvas beta environment as an instructor?
  • How do I access the Canvas test environment as an instructor?
  • How do I log out of Canvas?

I hope that this will be of some help to you.  Sing out if you have any questions...thanks!