[Discussions] Allow teachers to subscribe to a group discussion

[Laura_Orsetti]

Our faculty would like to be able to subscribe to the group discussions in their course so they can follow along, be alerted when a student posts something new, post feedback, and keep discussions on track.

(This was originally submitted by Brandon Pousley, but did not receive enough votes to move forward.  I was hoping this time it would get more votes.)

[skylesa]

I had an instructor ask for this very thing just the other day. He has one student participating at a distance and wants to keep a running discussion with her. He doesn't want others to see the thread - so groups, right? Wrong! Because he can't subscribe to the discussion, he doesn't know when she posts. The instructor likes the idea of a discussion because they can begin new threads for each different topic, but it is still within the same prompt.

[makraft]

I had the same request this week, too. Admittedly, most instructors will not want to get all those notifications, but they should have the ability to opt-in.

Specifically, our instructor said:

I am not finding the canvas discussion boards to be particularly useful teaching tools.

1. accessing the discussion board of a group is not straightforward - this makes it difficult to see if any posts have been made that I need to respond to.

2. I am still not notified if someone replies to an existing post. I would like to be able to follow (in the Facebook or stackoverflow sense) a thread.

[curtain]

I also am in support of this feature and it's need.  I had an instructor say

So even if I post to a discussion I still don't get to subscribe?  The students have been requesting smaller discussion groups as my online class gets larger and so I thought I'd try it out this semester, but the downside is I've lost track of their discussions and some students are complaining about the "nonsense" some of their fellows are spouting online.

You are right that it needs to be the same opt-in subscribe as the others but there are plenty of cases where instructors want to know what is going on in a discussion and would like a notification of activity.   I also say yes to the 'subscribe to all group activity' because as indicated sometimes they are used to facilitate work where the instructor would like to be party to each individual sets of effort.

[makraft]

I am directing my instructor to use Piazza.com - it has more flexible group and communications support. I hate sending people out to a third party tool, but it seems the shortest route for him right now.

[erlend_thune]

Our instructors at the University of Agder in Norway were used to telling their students to put a bin outside the students group room if they needed help from the instructor. They wanted a similar behavior in Canvas. One could argue that this is a better solution than having the instructor subscribe to all the group discussions, especially since an instructor might have many groups in large classes. But being able to do both things in native Canvas would of course be best.

We solved the “bin” feature using custom js/css in Canvas. It is a small piece of a larger open source custom Canvas design which is desribed here: http://matematikk-mooc.github.io/​

The main javascript code for the “bin” solution can be found in this file:

https://github.com/matematikk-mooc/frontend/blob/master/src/js/modules/menu.js

Just search for showDiscussionGroupMenu in that file. The code is depending on other files in https://github.com/matematikk-mooc/frontend, but a javascript programmer should be able to extract the functionality in a smaller set of custom css/js files.

The images below is taken from a students group discussion view. When the student group needs help, one of the student presses the "Tilkall veileder" button (notify instructor). This in turn leads to the steps shown below.

[kmeeusen]

This is great  @erlend_thune ​!

Thank you for sharing this work-round!

It would be awesome if you could also share this with the Canvas Developers group.

Thanks again,

KLM

[erlend_thune]

Thanks Kelley! I have written a blog post in the developer group now: Notify instructor button in group discussions

[Renee_Carney]

  Idea is currently in Product Radar Learn more about this stage...

[scabbage]

I merge sections of multiple Canvas courses.  And then I limit graded discussions to section groups so that students only see posts from those in the same section and aren't overwhelmed by the number of responses.  I'd like to be able to subscribe to these discussions so that I can take a quick glance at student posts as they come in and intervene if a post is inappropriate or incorrect or comment if a student makes an interesting point.  It's just more convenient to have these come into my e-mail inbox rather than having to go into the Canvas shell and wade through all the posts every time I want to check what's new.

[fervin]

This is a great idea, especially if you could choose broad discussions with fellow teachers and then narrow down to more specific classes/subjects you have in common.