[ARCHIVED] Share Discussions (including replies) Across Courses

[jhough]

I had a teacher ask me this:

"Is it possible to share a discussion (with all the replies) across courses? I teach an elective with 3 grades in it and they are all separate courses. I just want to be able to show 6th graders what 7th graders are doing/discussing or 8th to 7th, etc. without having to manually copy and paste replies from one course discussion to another."

Is this possible? Not just copying across different courses, but actually having the discussion be between these courses? I wasn't aware of any way to do this, and I didn't see anything here or in the guides. Thoughts?

[Stef_retired · Accepted solution]

Hi,  @jhough ‌, it is not possible to share one course's discussion to another course, and a shared discussion of this nature would most certainly run afoul of FERPA.

[jhough]

That's pretty much what I thought! Just thought I'd check to see if I was

missing anything.

Jenny Hough

Digital Learning TOSA

Bethel School District - Spanaway, WA

@_JennyHough @BSD_diglearn

“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”

-Robert F. Kennedy

On Thu, Apr 9, 2020 at 11:56 AM Stefanie Sanders <instructure@jiveon.com>

[josey]

@Stef_retired I don't understand your claim that this would run afoul of FERPA. Other LMS's allow for this. Asking my 1st period class to discuss with my 4th period class via a digital discussion board does not seem like a FERPA violation to me. There is no sharing of student educational records or other privacy violation. 

[Stef_retired]

@josey  I've seen about as many interpretations of FERPA as there are schools, so I always take the most conservative approach when discussing sharing student information across multiple courses. Many schools do not allow students enrolled in one online section (course) to even see the names of students enrolled in another section; your mileage may vary.