Allow discussion owner to be changed

[mathieu-plourde]

Hi,

Has anyone else noticed the following behavior in Canvas?

When you create a new discussion as a teacher or a course designer, your avatar and name gets assigned to it. A nice touch, isn't it?

Here is where it gets dicey. If I'm a course designer preparing a course site for a teacher, unless I masquerade as the instructor, the discussions show up under my name, which is at best confusing for students. And I have no other way to transfer the ownership back to the instructor. He has to recreate the discussions, period.

Another use case is when course imports are used. If I import a IMS CC .zip file from another site, the discussions will not be assigned to any user at all.

Could it be possible to enable:

1. Unassign discussions so they don't show up as owned by anyone (like the second screenshot)?
2. Transfer ownership back to another instructor in the class on individual discussions or in bulk?

That's it, thanks for voting up!

[Renee_Carney]

700958421‌

Thank you for this submission.  There was a past (archived) idea that had a fair amount of votes and conversation.  You might want to cross-link and share your new idea with that group.  https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/1485 

[mathieu-plourde]

Thanks for the pointer, Renee! I posted comments on two related ideas.

https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/1521 

https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/1485 

[thayerm]

There are quite a few requests that are similar to this. I would like to note that even this morning I had a faculty who is a steward of a course (created the master copy) ask me how to hide his information from the discussion because the teacher of the courses think it will be confusing to the students. If end user experience is important (it is) then this needs to be a higher priority.

[stuart_ryan]

I think this is a great idea. We are looking into using APIs for course copies and the like, I would *love* to see this possible with an API as well (if done in the front end), that way, following the Course Copy (and/or possibly as part of) we could provide the nominated teacher to re-assign the discussion to.

[awilliams]

For what it's worth, if you design in a different "sandbox" course and then import the content into the actual course, the author info is removed.

[cholling]

Definitely would a huge bonus for those institutions who have staff support of any kind that periodically work in courses. I know we sure would use it a lot here. And, unfortunately the masquerade function has not been allowed at the "regular" admin level only at "super" admin levels here for security purposes, so that option isn't available.

[scottdennis]

For what its worth, it used to be true that when you copied a course from one shell into another, the discussion author info would come with the discussion but, I think, at the prompting of a previous feature idea they changed Canvas to behave as Adam mentioned.

[ericaeducator]

This is the workaround I've been using for some time in Canvas, but it'd be even better if I didn't need to workaround it to begin with!  

The same applies for groups copying over in Canvas (which I realize is another thread altogether).  Again, there's a "workaround" but it's unnecessarily complicated and takes a significantly greater amount of time to do (as opposed to, say, having the groups copy over automatically(!!!), or, having the ability to check a box (as the OP suggested) to remove one's face from a discussion.  

It's all about time-saving and practicality, my friends!

[cms_hickss]

And now I need to test this for Blueprint courses....

[Stef_retired]

cms_hickss‌, have you had time to test this? This idea, possibly associated, just came in: https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/10143-blueprint-course-annoucments 

[cholling]

I agree; this is very important for any course that has support staff that works on behalf of the faculty for any reason.

[don_bryn]

I'm working on a google doc to bulk adjust announcement dates and I thought maybe I could update the announcement author that way too.   So far I'm able to create the author javascript object to pass back to Canvas, but it doesn't change the author.   Without being able to see debugging in Canvas I'm not sure I'm able to go any further. . .   I hate that when I copy my course each semester, I can keep the date-specific announcements, but it looks like I didn't post them.

[cms_hickss]

I have not. It's on my list of things to try and complete before the holiday.

[don_bryn]

I gave up on trying to change the author via the API.   We really need some sort of access to a setting that assigns the author to every announcement so we can decide if we want to keep the same author, change it, or delete it all together.   Especially when copying courses or creating announcements for other teachers.

[aaron_bahmer]

Courses created from a blueprint that includes a discussion also has the author information stripped out (which is good, initially) -- so having that information replaced with the assigned instructor's information would be great!

[don_bryn]

I have a hack I've been using:  Every time I create an announcement I add my name and Avatar to the top (looks like the original but is INSIDE the announcement).  That way, when copied, it still looks like I'm the author, though students only see that once inside.   Still, it instills more confidence in the students that I'm making the announcement.   You can see how I did it here:

https://community.canvaslms.com/people/don.bryn 

[scain]

This is also applicable for announcements. It’s also valuable when a course is created in a sandbox and transferred into the actual course. A “claim ownership” option near publication (or maybe even linked to publication?) could be an elegant way of managing this perhaps?

[ericaeducator]

That's the method I have used since 2016 when our University first adopted Canvas.  It's a workaround, but again, like group settings, not a true "solution" to this issue.

[nsweeten]

Agreed! Thank you for addressing this 700958421!

When I am building courses for a faculty member, this unwanted authorship stamp generates a lot of confusion. "Who is this person?" or "Who is my teacher?"

Most of the higher ed courses I've seen--or all of them--do not encourage students to open new discussions, so the picture and author notations are distracting clutter. It may be useful in a group workspace, not sure. I can't picture who is using this feature as designed and loves it.

Anyone?...Anyone?

Inferior workaround: I put the school logo in my account instead of my face. 

Now if I could only get my name and the date to disappear. 

[j_e_sjoberg]

This is a really problematic issue when creating materials for canvas courses that are then used by several teachers - it causes a great deal of confusion. Please please please allow a function where a discussion started by a teacher can be 'ID' free.