Canvas Discussions and Canopy from 11trees

[sarah_corrow]

I'm evaluating the use of Canopy for my school and working with 11trees, the developers, to refine the solution further. They have some powerful ideas about how to make discussions more valuable for teachers and students including algorithms to measure discussion health. Curious how other schools would view this goal and what metrics might be important. Since Canopy will make these algorithms configurable at the institution level (and perhaps course) there will be flexibility on how/whether to use them.

[AndrewMcCann]

Thank you Sarah!

To put a visual with the question see screenshot below.

Canopy securely connects to Canvas to transform course data - with the goal of making it easier to engage with the right students at the right time...and also to create wisdom from the ocean of data created by all this activity.

The table below presents a spreadsheet-like view of discussions. Instructors can quickly respond from this view - replies pop back into Canvas as if you typed them there directly. Notice the last row in the header - Health. This is the calculation we hope can help educators better understand what creates healthy online discussions. A relative measure (the numbers aren't meaningful as a standalone, really), the number represents a weighted average combining % of students posting, % of students replying, % of students replying to more than 2 other students, number of posts with greater than a specific word count and the % of top level posts with more than 2 levels of replies. The weighting is customizable and we can add/remove other attributes into the mix...

 Very curious to hear what measures might be indicators (or leading indicators) of healthy discussion and feedback on the overall approach.