Anonymous Discussion Forums

[scottdennis]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

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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

[MandyJJ]

Come on Canvas listen to the community! enabling the choice for anonymous posting to Discussions is vital, at least anonymous to the rest of the students so that they can feel free to make mistakes!

[CounselingSD]

I am creating a Canvas class for both onboarding and on-going support for students with disabilities starting at our college. It is critical (and the law) that we maintain the confidentiality of the students enrolled in our disability support services. Students enrolled in our support class need a way to participate in the class, and interact student-to-student, without revealing their identity if they wish to remain private about having a disability. 

Please help us provide equitable support and access to our disabled students who also have the right to keep the fact that they are enrolled in Disability Services confidential.

[Katrina-Hess]

Hi everyone, please stay tuned as we are actively exploring Anonymous posting as well as Moderation for our Discussions feature. Thanks so much for your patience and feedback!

Best, Katrina

[Beth_Salerno]

Glad to hear anonymous posting is being "actively explored".  I too would find this helpful so students can give feedback to the professor on the course (interim evaluation) and ideas for improvement.  I have done it using anonymous submission directly to me, but then student can't see each other's ideas.

[vnieders]

We have several instructors at JWCC who have asked about anonymous discussions. Especially in the Psychology classes.

[svishal2001]

I strongly support this feature as an option on any discussion forum. In many cases, this is the only reason we have to choose external tools such as Piazza or others, which allow anonymous posts. Students don't ask questions for help with course topics unless they are anonymous. 

[sstrand]

I support adding the option to set up discussion that enables students to post anonymously. In addition to the rationales posted so far within the past months (students only asking questions if anonymous), I have a statistics class where students create a survey in Qualtrics. Currently, they post their links to their surveys via the discussion board, effectively eliminating the anonymity of which survey belongs to which student (the data are still anonymous; however, the creator is not).

Having the option to make this one discussion board anonymous would add that extra layer of security and privacy for students.

Thanks. 

[sarah_devenport]

We'd really like to have the option to anonymise discussion boards, for similar reasons to many who have already commented 

[bciotti]

Please implement this feature.  Almost none of my students use the Canvas discussion boards because they are too shy to post non-anonymously. 

[AnneHoney]

I'm surprised that this was started in 2015 and we still can't have anonymous posts. So much better for question forums and means students less likely to feel the need to email you personally because they're embarrassed about their question (which is usually actually relevant to others).