Are new feature ideas still being considered as part of Discussions/Announcements Redesign?

[paulamiranda]

Hello, I am shepherding along some feature requests re: the Discussions tool from instructors at our school and came across this user group. I saw that there were several new features added over the last couple of years, and was wondering if these are the only ones planned for the tool, or if others are still being considered?

Here are the feature requests we'd like to submit:

1. Discussion forum that can be easily searched, where the search function searches the content of the discussion posts, not just the titles and authors. Currently, it's impossible to see if someone has already asked or answered a question in a discussion forum. For a small class, this may not be an issue, but in a large enrollment class, it can lead to a lot of noise and confusion, adding to the administrative workload of answering the same questions over and over again.
2. Instructor endorsement for good student answers, where an instructor in the course can pin or highlight a student response to a discussion prompt that they would like other students to review.
3. Aggregate and count of discussion posts for the entire course, so instructors can more easily review them as for grading students' participation and effort. Currently, they'd have to open Speedgrader for each discussion, and there are no user statistics provided for discussion posts.

Do these already have ideas, or should I create new ones, and if so, where?

Thank you!

[hesspe]

These are excellent suggestions and very clearly articulated. 

[lshulman]

#2: for instructor endorsement, consider using the "like" feature and set the discussion to move most liked posts to top of discussion. 

Limitations:

1. This allows EVERYONE to "like" a post. No one can know it was the instructor or a student who liked the post. 

2. Not sure how this will work for sub replies that might be liked. Will those move the entire thread to top? But at least others will see which posts are liked and how many likes it got.

[DrAJP]

YES! There really needs to be a way to search the forums and to easily, quickly see a count. 

Also, Canvas currently shows a discussion post as "needing grading" after one post. There needs to be a way to tell Canvas that X number of posts are required before it needs grading. Blackboard has this feature. 

[lshulman]

If we are comparing Canvas to Blackboard discussion features, I liked the five star rating system Blackboard has for every post. I used it as a "grading" system so students could easily know which posts I thought were "excellent", vs. Just "good" or "poor" etc.

Then there is how Bb handles edited posts: it marks them as "new" (even if they had already been read by the user). And shows as "edited" and allows the reader to toggle to view the original version to see just what was changed. Canvas not doing any of this is a BIG problem:

1. If the teacher has already seen and "graded" the post, they won't know it has been edited, perhaps improved, and needs to be re-read and re-graded.

2. We won't have any idea whether the edit was minor (adding punctuation) or substantive (a new sentence or paragraph added), thus improving it.

I find I have to turn OFF student ability to edit posts. Instead, I just have them reply to their posts with any corrections or additions. This is the only way I can be sure to catch the "edits" and know just what is being changed. 

[ProfessorBeyrer]

Thanks for mentioning the ability for instructors to see what's been changed. It's been my practice to tell students that they need to message me when they have made a change to a post, as the read/unread status of the post does not change after it's been edited.

[DanBrownMCC]

These are all excellent suggestions. I'm particularly interested in #1 regarding expanding the search functionality. Being able to search entries across all discussions in a course feels like a standard feature. Otherwise, the user has to open each individual discussion and perform the same search repeatedly. The browser itself can already do this with Ctrl-F to search within a page. The Canvas feature should exceed this capability.

[Code-with-Ski]

@paulamiranda 

I agree with your ideas.  The search and instructor endorsement sound especially helpful when setting up a Q&A discussion board and you are trying to encourage students to help each other with answering questions too.

For Idea #3, I may have a workaround that you could use while we wait for Canvas/Instructure to consider developing the feature.  I built a free Chrome extension, Canvas LMS Mods (Basic), as a side project to add helpful features to the Canvas LMS.  One of the features is a custom course report for discussion replies.  This allows you to get all the replies to a discussion board and provides a count for the number of times a user has replied.  You can view the report in the browser and if you would like you can download the result as a CSV file to do further data manipulation.

If you are interested you can learn more about it below:

• Creating a Chrome Extension to Use with Canvas LMS 
• Custom Course Reports