(This was originally submitted by Brandon Pousley, but did not receive enough votes to move forward. I was hoping this time it would get more votes.)
This idea has moved to the next stage and will be open for voting among the Canvas Community, from Wed. February 3, 2016 - Wed. May 4, 2016.
Check out this doc for additional details about how the voting process works!
It would be extremely helpful for faculty to be able to subscribe to ungraded discussion groups. In our course, we use separate discussions for each module within the course, and while each student must submit a graded presentation in one module or another, it clutters the gradebook to make each of these discussions graded. However, we instructors desperately need notifications when new posts are made, so we can tell if a student has put a proverbial bullet in the furnace or is way off course in the content they are synthesizing for other students' learning. Thanks for considering this issue and voting yes.
I agree this is a great idea! I have experienced trouble with instructors and group discussions, so anything to help keep things afloat would be excellent!
Yes! Instructors need to be able to easily join their students in group discussions, just as they do in a face-to-face setting. We desperately need this feature.
It is interesting to me how things evolve. If I understand correctly groups were originally designed to be a space where students could go off on their own and work and then come back into the course space to interact with their instructor and other students - like going off to the corner of the classroom for group work. It sounds like, as is often the case, people are using the toolset in ways that the original designers never imagined.
Admittedly, Scott Dennis yes, but that is because we came from Angel where we could set up Teams, and cannot find an equivalent to it in Canvas. If Canvas could do something more like Angel Teams, we'd be all over that like flies on honey! But meanwhile, we are using Groups as best we can...
And, in K12, we have a greater responsibility for supporting students. While we love for them to collaborate, this is needed.
Laura Orsetti, Groups is the Canvas take on Angel teams, and while a good tool it can be improved to be a great tool. As Scott Dennis pointed out, this idea and functionality is evolving, just as elearning in general is evolving to become even more a collaborate learning environment in emulation of and improvement on the traditional classroom environment.
As Lisa Casto pointed out, in the K-12 environment students need support; but I would like to add that this is also true in the Higher-Ed environment - learners are learners!
I will support this feature request which seems to be gaining better traction in its second iteration!
Agent K
Hi Everyone,
LOVE this idea! As I think about the problem you're trying to solve here, it's analogous to walking the classroom and listening to different group conversations to find out what stage of a problem they are working on, address any questions they might have, or intervene with additional support or clarification. I can even imagine taking this one step further and allowing a teacher to subscribe to ALL of the activity in a Canvas Group.
Enhancements to Groups are not a high priority for the next six months, so I will recommend that we archive this idea for now. That said, I would still love to learn more from the voters on this thread.
Thanks for your feedback, all!
What to "listen" for is quite contextualised, but includes
Subscriptions would depend on context. Not only graded discussions. Maybe one or more threads are tagged as moderated (followed) and other threads are student-only, or maybe all threads are relevant such as when discussion is a learning task set to groups.
Maybe subscribing to all activity, such as in my mentoring model of teaching where students are sharing documents for learning too.
I had an instructor ask for this very thing just the other day. He has one student participating at a distance and wants to keep a running discussion with her. He doesn't want others to see the thread - so groups, right? Wrong! Because he can't subscribe to the discussion, he doesn't know when she posts. The instructor likes the idea of a discussion because they can begin new threads for each different topic, but it is still within the same prompt.
I had the same request this week, too. Admittedly, most instructors will not want to get all those notifications, but they should have the ability to opt-in.
Specifically, our instructor said:
I am not finding the canvas discussion boards to be particularly useful teaching tools.
1. accessing the discussion board of a group is not straightforward - this makes it difficult to see if any posts have been made that I need to respond to.
2. I am still not notified if someone replies to an existing post. I would like to be able to follow (in the Facebook or stackoverflow sense) a thread.
I also am in support of this feature and it's need. I had an instructor say
So even if I post to a discussion I still don't get to subscribe? The students have been requesting smaller discussion groups as my online class gets larger and so I thought I'd try it out this semester, but the downside is I've lost track of their discussions and some students are complaining about the "nonsense" some of their fellows are spouting online.
You are right that it needs to be the same opt-in subscribe as the others but there are plenty of cases where instructors want to know what is going on in a discussion and would like a notification of activity. I also say yes to the 'subscribe to all group activity' because as indicated sometimes they are used to facilitate work where the instructor would like to be party to each individual sets of effort.
I am directing my instructor to use Piazza.com - it has more flexible group and communications support. I hate sending people out to a third party tool, but it seems the shortest route for him right now.
Our instructors at the University of Agder in Norway were used to telling their students to put a bin outside the students group room if they needed help from the instructor. They wanted a similar behavior in Canvas. One could argue that this is a better solution than having the instructor subscribe to all the group discussions, especially since an instructor might have many groups in large classes. But being able to do both things in native Canvas would of course be best.
We solved the “bin” feature using custom js/css in Canvas. It is a small piece of a larger open source custom Canvas design which is desribed here: http://matematikk-mooc.github.io/
The main javascript code for the “bin” solution can be found in this file:
https://github.com/matematikk-mooc/frontend/blob/master/src/js/modules/menu.js
Just search for showDiscussionGroupMenu in that file. The code is depending on other files in https://github.com/matematikk-mooc/frontend, but a javascript programmer should be able to extract the functionality in a smaller set of custom css/js files.
The images below is taken from a students group discussion view. When the student group needs help, one of the student presses the "Tilkall veileder" button (notify instructor). This in turn leads to the steps shown below.
This is great Erlend Thune (admin)!
Thank you for sharing this work-round!
It would be awesome if you could also share this with the Canvas Developers group.
Thanks again,
KLM
Thanks Kelley! I have written a blog post in the developer group now: Notify instructor button in group discussions
I merge sections of multiple Canvas courses. And then I limit graded discussions to section groups so that students only see posts from those in the same section and aren't overwhelmed by the number of responses. I'd like to be able to subscribe to these discussions so that I can take a quick glance at student posts as they come in and intervene if a post is inappropriate or incorrect or comment if a student makes an interesting point. It's just more convenient to have these come into my e-mail inbox rather than having to go into the Canvas shell and wade through all the posts every time I want to check what's new.
This is a great idea, especially if you could choose broad discussions with fellow teachers and then narrow down to more specific classes/subjects you have in common.
The option should be available to those that will find it useful. I know I would find it very useful and would reduce the number of CLICKS that I would have to do if I have several discussion groups. If someone does not want to subscribe they wouldn't have to.
In the Canvas document about how to subscribe to a discussion, it states "You can also subscribe to discussions posted within student groups." How do I subscribe to a discussion as an instructor?
Does this Canvas guide document need updating? I had hoped that if a teacher replied to a post in a group discussion that they would be automatically subscribed but it appears not. The subscribe choice on the group discussion index page is not available since the teacher is not a group member.
A simple solution: let teachers be group members too. And a member of more than one group in a group set.
Nice possible idea.
The option for teachers to be group members also affects other group functions, such as announcements. Presently all get announcements for all groups (depending on their settings). If groups are spaces for students to work independently, then these announcements are not needed (whereas course announcements are) and would not be received if teachers were not members. If groups are spaces for moderated or guided learning, then assigning the relevant teachers rather than all teachers to all groups makes sense. The ability for non-member staff of a certain level to enter any group space is still required, but as members they would be able to interact as members such as to subscribe to discussions and receive announcements.
At our school we have multiple teachers on some of the courses, with different groups assigned to each teacher. It would be great if, by subscribing to the group, the teacher could choose to "show the group in Groups tab" enabling the teacher to easily access all his/her groups across different courses from the Groups tab.
We have TAs whose job is to respond in Discussions and we use groups for Discussions. Right now our TAs can't subscribe to all the Discussions they are responsible for and that limits both the indications they have about activity in the Discussions and ways they have of tracking which posts they have responded to.
Being able to put our TAs in > 1 group in a course would be very helpful.
The Radar idea stage has been removed from the Feature Idea Process. You can read more about why in the blog post Adaptation: Feature Idea Process Changes.
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Thank you for your Feature Idea submission! As you noted, this same idea was submitted previously, here: Allow teachers to subscribe to a group discussion, in a different voting period. It may contain valuable discussion and insight as this discussion moves through the voting process.
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