Anonymous Discussion Forums

[scottdennis]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

---

Idea:

Instructors can create discussions that allow for posts to be made anonymously

Use Cases:

As an instructor, I want to create discussions in which participation is anonymous. This would free my students to share their thoughts without worrying about judgement / criticism by their peers or me. They'd take risks they might not otherwise.

transferred from the old Community

Originally posted by: Lynn McCarty
Thank you especially for contributions by: Rob Ditto, Allison Pyle, Renee Carney, Robert Jones

[daniel_sze]

Dear all

Please note that in BLACKBOARD learning platform, this Anonymous discussion forum has been there for many years. I hope that CANVAS developers really need to look at what competitors are offering and supporting.

I strongly support the use of this Anonymous Discussion Forum in Higher Education (University and Adult learning). There will be a SWITICH so that teachers in Primary School and High School (Secondary School) to turn off this Anonymous Discussion because they need to keep the progress of individual students under very close monitoring.

Cheers

Daniel.

Dr Daniel Man-yuen SZE PhD (Birmingham) PhD (Sydney) MMedSc MSc MEd FIBMS CFIAC

Program Coordinator MC158 - Master of Laboratory Medicine

School of Health and Biomedical Sciences, RMIT

Building 201, Level 9, Room 3

Plenty Road

Bundoora 3083, Australia

Tel. +61 3 9925 6524

Mobile: +61 414 477 466

Email: daniel.sze@rmit.edu.au<mailto:daniel.sze@rmit.edu.au>

Website: http://www1.rmit.edu.au/staff/daniel-sze

MC158 Canvas Website: https://rmit.instructure.com/courses/39079

CRICOS provider code: 00122A

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[jemling1]

This features needs to happen quickly. 

[aime_fournier]

Yes, I used Blackboard in 2008 and the anonymous discussion feature was very useful, for all the reasons explained above. I've been using Canvas for 4 years and none of the features added in that time were as useful as this one would be. Disappointing.

[jmarusa]

I was thinking this would be a good idea for my class.  People have been suggesting this for 4 years and no action?  How much are colleges paying for this system?

It's clear that those behind Canvas have no interest in making this a feature, despite the interest put forth by educators.  

If Canvas is this unreceptive to customer suggestions, next steps for those serious about this would be to appeal to decision makers at their institutions and suggest taking their money to a learning management system that might better meet their needs.

[tricia]

Harmonize Discussion is an external tool that you can plug in to Canvas and supports anonymous discussions. 

Edu App Center 

https://tryharmonize.42lines.net 

[jmarusa]

It looks like there's a fee for this beyond one term, so this wouldn't be a good long term solution for me.  I do appreciate the suggestion.

Honestly, this is something Canvas should support.  How hard would it be?  When a student posts now, there's got to be part of the code on Canvas that says something like

...
print StudentName

...

so why not add a checkbox "Enable Anonymous Reply" that functions as a boolean variable and alter the code to say

...

if !Anonymous {

print StudentName

}

...

I can't imagine it'd be much more complex than that.

[rhargis]

Our faculty use Piazza for anonymous discussions, and while it works, another extraneous external integration isn't exactly the ideal solution.  Not to diminish the value of LTI integrations.  They serve a purpose, but often add unnecessary layers of complexity for faculty and students in the process. 

For something like this, a native solution for this makes much more sense than using yet another LTI which will, ultimately, take students outside of the Canvas environment, defeating the whole point of the LMS.

</rant>

~rh

[radhika_kumar]

I think anonymous discussion forum is a vital tool for any teacher who believes in social constructive teaching approach; one of the best teaching practices. It would be great if canvas could adopt a feature like this. 

[venitk]

We have Ask the Professor discussion forums that allow students to ask questions. In D2L we could make those discussions anonymous, allowing students to ask questions they might be embarrassed to ask otherwise.

We could also use this to post anonymous writing samples. 

[hiseki]

Really?  It has been suggested more than 4 years ago, and we still do not have this function?  As a matter of fact, I did not know the existence of this forum until now.  I think we need to spread the words around.