[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.)

[jenny_seidemann]

I definitely need to be able to subscribe to discussions split into groups. I tried groups for the first time this term and was dismayed to find that I could not receive notifications when a students posted second and subsequent replies. This left me having to search each group individually to see if a student had replied to me or to any other students. An important part of my online teaching is responding to student discussion posts, and this lack of notifications ability made that too tedious and time-consuming, I will not be using groups again until this is fixed.

[SophieHill]

It is possible to subscribe and therefore get notifications when students post to discussion boards where they are not divided into groups.  However, to make the work more managable for instructors and for the students to feel part of a smaller group we have divided them up for most discussion boards. Currently it is not possible to subscribe to group discussions.  This would be really helpful.

[lflulilly]

It is very odd and inconvenient that the instructor cannot subscribe the group discussion forums and get notifications.  Canvas should have had this function avaialble. 

[MoniqueRoth]

Permitting instructors to subscribe to group discussions would bring this functionality in line with the capabilities of non-grouped discussions and would allow instructors to better monitor student activity.

[xanderknoll]

It's been almost five years and this feature still hasn't been implemented... I think it's been enough "Open for Conversation". Having this feature should be a no-brainer. 

[SirDrAaron]

I have had faculty asking for this now in 2022. It would be good to move this forward.

[LindseySharp]

This is a feature we would also like to see implemented. I don't believe preventing instructors from being able to subscribe to group discussions serves any function. 

[Garwalf]

I would also like to see this feature implemented. 

I regularly use Group Discussions to separate students by enrollment sections in order to comply with my university's privacy policies. This means that if I cannot subscribe to group discussions, I cannot subscribe to any discussions in those classes.

[RobWell]

I'm not sure that 'voting' for this feature is the right thing to do.  In my opinion, this is core functionality that should already be in here.

We were using 'Blackboard' and I was able to run group projects well, moving to Canvas is like going back 30 years.