Two Important Issues: Navigating Group Discussions and Discussion Due Dates

[panke]

1. The new discussion feature does not display the To-Do date at the top of the page for discussions. This is confusing and inconsistent with other content types that are added to the student to-do list with a date (e.g., pages, assignments).
2. The ability for faculty to see all the discussion groups in a group discussion at the top of the discussion page has disappeared in the redesign. This is a huge problem because it takes away to ability to manage group discussions effectively on one place (the old design displays the number of replies in each group, making it easy to spot a group that needs additional support).

[emily_smith2]

These are an issue for us as well.

Especially the ability to be able to see group contributions at a glace, and to check that the right group set has been applied to the right discussion. I now have to go into edit to check, and even to get to the edit button is now an additional click.

[Ksimp]

This is actually something I just figured out yesterday! If it is a group discussion, that you have assigned the groups to, you will notice a 2 person icon just to the left of the "search entries or author" bar. That is your first alert that you have assigned groups, it will not be there if it is not a group discussion or you have not assigned groups yet. Then, if you click on the icon, it will drop down into the groups that are assigned to that discussion; you can just overview all the groups or click one to go to that groups board.

[mskoch]

I just did some tests and finally figured out that imported group discussions will not display the "Group" (2-person) icon on the tool bar until groups have been created in the linked group set (i.e. the default Project Group). See screenshots of an imported group discussion before and after groups were created in the Project Group. 

Group sets not copying forward has always been a challenge. Instructors tend to focus on updating due dates and content when preparing for a new semester, and often forget about this extra step - even with the legacy Discussions with a note that said "Since this is a group discussion....." displayed on the page. Now without any kind of visual cue, I can see many instructors not remembering that groups need to be re-created until too late, such as when they found out the SpeedGrader display no student posts.

Is this really the intended behavior, or am I missing something? 

[venitk]

It has already happened to us. A course used to have groups but didn't need them this time, but the discussions still defaulted to being group discussions. However, the instructor hadn't created groups. So, then speedgrader didn't work properly with those discussions. 

I really appreciated old discussion's visual cue letting you know that it was set up as a group discussion, but didn't have any groups assigned to it. That saved so much time. Now you have to edit the discussion, then scroll down to see if it is set up as a group discussion. It's an inconvenience, to say the very least.

@SamGarza1 and @TamasBalogh, it would be very helpful if we had a visual cue, without having to edit the discussion, to see if it's set up as a group discussion and which group set was assigned to it.