New discussion forum - 0/5 stars, do not recommend

[DrCherieRebar]

Just adding my voice to those who have raised concerns on the new discussion forum... I don't mind change but in my experience with the new format, this wasn't a change for the better. I am teaching two large course sections this summer; so far, I've spent more time fielding student questions and concerns about the discussions than I've taught.

With due respect, since I know Canvas tries to make things user-friendly and productive (and they usually get it right), the students I am teaching hate the new design. The fellow faculty I teach with are usually early adopters and very tech-savvy, but they are displeased too. I hope this change isn't permanent, although I've heard it is. Hopefully, the Canvas masters will hear the concerns and rethink this layout.   

[kirsten_naughto]

My experience also says student don't like it. They can't tell where the replies are.  Even if you click to open up all the responses, another click or two around the discussions and they are closed again. Its not intuitive to click on side by side and have nothing happen. They can't tell to click on the replies in order to see the side by side, especially if they've already opened all the threads which then closed again somewhere along the way. They can't see where one response ends and the next begins. It is NOT user-friendly. This is an AWKWARD update.

[mikusheadphones]

it's so bad that i ended up writing a rant to one of my posts and linking several Canvas Community posts to it because I literally have never seen less feedback/replies from peers than this week and it is so overbloated with bad code that it took an hour to get my original post on my screen without jumping up or down, crashing my browser, or just it being missing entirely. My professor even said that he can't figure out how to navigate it, it's so bad.

[JacquelynChrist]

Agreed - I do NOT like this redesign. I'm having to hunt for new replies instead of them being easily visible. This just added work for me as an instructor! NOT GOOD!

[rlbrown21]

Canva does hate teachers, so this is just par for the course

[Hypershark]

Agreed! The new discussion board is not user friendly at all from both sides: instructors and students. There should be an option to revert it to the way it was. There was no need for the change.

[canvas_admin]

While I agree that their implementation of the New Design is poor and things could be done better, I disagree that there was no need for the change. We've been asking for the ability to sort oldest-newest and vice versa for ELEVEN YEARS. I'm happy to see that implemented FINALLY, but there was no need for Instructure to try to give us a new vehicle when all we wanted to do was upgrade the sound system in the current vehicle.

[NAshcraft]

I can see that being able to sort the posts could be beneficial. However, there should also be a way to keep the posts in a fixed order.  As an instructor, I try to reply to every original post, and that is difficult to keep track of when the order of the posts keeps changing.

[muneeb_mobashar]

Its funny that this format (canvas community) is much more user friendly.

[rlbrown21]

no kidding!  give us this inside canvas!  is that too much to ask (of course it is)

[mikusheadphones]

i mean, from a student view, you cannot sort the way you suggest. it randomly reorders the posts based on the most recent replies, so you are screwed if you are trying to find your own post

[chad_raymond]

I agree: bad redesign. Used to have an "Unread" button to quickly scroll through unread discussion posts -- now it's gone. The jump to the split screen to read replies in a thread just makes my visual field more cluttered.

Edited to note: I've been using Canvas for over a decade, for both in-person and online courses. All my course shells have discussions. Monitoring/participating in the discussions as the instructor is much more inconvenient now.

[BenjaminBeshwat]

I couldn't agree more. This new design is not user friendly for either the student or the instructor. My courses are discussion heavy and this is an unnecessary burden on both the students and myself. I sincerely hope that we can opt back to the old format. If instructors like the new format that is great, but please let us opt back to the old format!

[rlbrown21]

Our faculty who are the heaviest users of discussions are pissed.  My entire weekend was flooded with complaints asking for the old tool back.  Canvas - you messed this one up, reset and start over

[mikusheadphones]

yeah i'm in a film class that our whole course relies on discussion posts and frequent replies and subreplies to those and my professor sent out an announcement asking for all of us to verify our student emails because he decided that since this was rolled out JUST before our final week of class, he's not even going to use Canvas next week and we are just emailing him our analysis because "I can't even figure out how to get the page to load, it just is so slow and crashes. I don't expect my students to use a tool that I can't use so we aren't going to have peer feedback next week unless you request to be on the email list".
You know it's bad when you get that email

[rlbrown21]

100% of our faculty feedback is negative.  And the one thing we wanted to see in the redesign was multiple due dates (check-ins), and they left it out.  Our faculty are not happy.

[barbara_filkins]

I couldn't agree more with the voices on this thread. I suspect we all get used to the poor design -- we'll have to. But Canvas needs to listen to the users -- not the overpaid software developer(s) who probably designed this.

[jenn_stevens]

We too have gotten complaints from our heaviest discussion users. An excerpt from a particularly thoughtful one about the power of the defaults and how they work against his pedagogy (emphasis mine):

I know there's absolutely nothing to be done about the matter, but I feel obliged, in any case, to note that this middle-of-the-term forced "upgrade" undermines the core of what I've been trying to do in my online course for the last decade-plus.

Three features do the bulk of the damage:

1. By default, the discussions are listed most recent first.
2. By default, it collapses all threads.
3. Bizarrely, it appears to reduce the font size of follow-up comments.

I'm aware of the workarounds for the first two and have already communicated them to my current class. But, as I said, it's undermining, because what I stress to people is that they need to read and respect everyone's comments, should read the complete thread before commenting, and should get off the idea of "my post" (i.e., always starting a new thread) and consider a thoughtful comment on a pre-existing post of equal value. It's challenging enough to get students to buy into the principle of pulling together without an interface that appears to privilege the last word written without much regard to what's gone before.

[canvas_admin]

The biggest complains from our faculty have been:
1. The change in font size on replies

2. Loss of permalinks in the forum. We frequently have professors link to earlier posts for questions that get repeatedly asked and they would link to the answer to the first time the question was posted.

3. The auto-tagging when replying to a student's post.

We asked for the sorting ability for ELEVEN years, so we are happy with that new feature. However, it feels like Instructure can never leave well enough alone and instead of making simple updates, they make wholesale changes that give with one hand and take away with the other hand. It would be great to have simple updates instead of wholesale makeovers!

[terhorstj]

Agreed. Keeping track of the discussions is going to be a nightmare in my 250-student sections. Please just give us a hierarchically threaded view, all threads expanded by default, quick way to jump to unread messages, and consistent font sizes.

[barbara_filkins]

I am starting a new term and completely agree with this. Every time I refresh it changes back to the newest first sort order. We can probably all live with the changes IF the defaults we want can stick.

The shear arrogance of Canvas in thinking they know better than those actually teaching is beyond comprehension, especially give the feedback that the community has provided before this change was made permanent.

[BrianO1]

I had to join the Canvas Community just to add my voice to this topic.  We've been using Canvas since 2013 and the 'new' discussion board design has us looking at other LMS's for the first time since then.  Some of the additions are nice (you can tag another person?) but we didn't really need that, and Canvas could have added those without ruining a well-functioning part of the system.  The new look is different, but not really better and the old functionality is almost completely gone.  This should be a tool for efficient communication, but now it is just frustrating for faculty and students.  We're encouraging our faculty to explore other assignment options because of the poor experience.  We'd go back to using it and liking it if instructors could lock the order (newest/oldest posts), lock 'show all replies', so that students don't have to remember to do that themselves each time they click in and out of the discussion board.  There also needs to be a logical break between posts to make it cleaner to know what thread you are reading.  I used to be a big proponent of Canvas-- but I'm not right now.