[Discussions] Export Discussions

[CindiKerns]

Please consider a feature that will allow students to export discussions and related threads. This can be a helpful resource at the end of the course. Professors will want the ability to release discussions for export so a release date option would be needed.

[cdroesse]

This would be extremely useful for both our instructors and students. Being able to export it in a format that is well-formatted and can easily be printed is also very important to our faculty. They have expressed an interest in being able to print the entire discussion board, review and mark up the responses and bring them to class. They also would like to be able to share the responses with other instructors and class guests. 

[peytoncraighill]

Discussions improvements will be a research area for us in 2016. For the time being, printing from the browser, copying and pasting particular sections, or grabbing screenshots are likely the best options for "exporting" Discussions (or pieces of Discussions) from the front-end of Canvas.

[aime_fournier]

A Use Case for this is for instructors to document if Discussions were useful. Same applies to all Content where students might post, and to Conversations.

[vkg]

This feature request is now closed for voting but I wanted to add to it that at U-M we see the difficulties in printing content -- discussions and other parts -- as an accessibility issue.  Some course participants can more easily assimilate information from print rather than on-screen and we'd like them to have fewer barriers to using the method that lets them learn best.

If anyone has any suggested workarounds for how best to accommodate people with print needs now, I'd love to hear them.

[greg_gay]

Voting appears to be closed in archive threads. For our courses, on canvas.net, we need to be able to export discussions  for two purposes.

Our Use Cases.

1. Providing an archive for students in current courses to browse through to see how past students answer question or completed activities.

2. Text data analysis, looking for patterns in students' posts to course activity threads.

I see from the October update, this feature is now on the radar.  Vote +1

[scottdennis]

Thanks, Greg.

Just fyi; yesterday I added a new feature request to the queue that opens on March 2nd that would allow students the open to add discussion activity to the archive of all assignment submissions that they may currently download.

[obrienja]

I have also looked for an export feature. I don't need the feature for any accreditation needs. I simply want a way for I and/or my studetns to export the entirety of the course Discussions on a per Discussion forum basis. My students are asked to submit answers to their assignments in Discussions. These assignments are open for all students and I to review and reply to, and I encourage open dialog on Discussions about the topics covered in the course. At the end of the course, when I used Blackboard, I exported the content for each week's Discussion in thread order so students could have it as a resource of what they and other students contributed during the course. I don't grade the Discussions, and they aren't attached to the Canvas Assignment feature at all. Much research goes into the content of student's posts, and I believe they ought to be treated as a valuable reference for their future work.

Having a well-formatted Discussion thread export where content wraps correctly and page breaks don't interfere with the thread continuity nor cut off portions of the content, and are easily printed or saved as a PDF would by my vote.

[canvas_admin]

Additional use case:

Some of our discussion forums require a follow-up question from the professor to the student.  A professor of ours wants his residential TA to go in and collect and categorize his follow-up questions in our online courses.

Since the residential TA is a student who may or may not have had these courses, I don't want to give the TA any sort of admin role/access, yet our these forums require a response before being able to see other posts, so giving the TA "student" access doesn't work either.  Being able to export out the discussion would allow me to send them to this TA without having to involve him in the course.

[tomtullio]

Just want to chime in, since I found my way here from the "Print discussions with names legible" submission.

In the "October Update"  @peytoncraighill  mentions "printing from the browser" as a workaround, but this remains relatively useless when the author names are obscured.  I was hoping that some clever custom CSS could override the JQuery print stylesheet's undesirable behavior in this regard, but have been unable to concoct anything that does the trick.

By any chance has anyone else tried & met with greater success?

[tomtullio]

Update: Well, that wasn't nearly as hard as I had convinced myself it was!

The original problem that  @annepwheeler ​ described (students' email addresses are printed over their names) can be rectified by adding:

@media print { a.avatar:after, a.author:after { content: none; } }

to your custom CSS file.