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.
Exports, assuming a usable file format, could be easily bulk uploaded to Turnitin or other originality services to check for originality in discussions. This might be an easier solution than rebuilding discussions to allow external assignment tools to work with discussions (although that would be cool too!).
Thank you for the note! We do look at these two together when we're looking for use cases, however we do not add the votes - for many are duplicate votes!
I think this would be great for documentation purposes. I did find a little trick that helped. I opened the SpeedGrader and opened up a student's discussion and replies. I then right-clicked and selected print. From there I could save as a PDF or Drive. It is not perfect but it worked.
For a professor, a class is a particular case of a course. For me, Canvas (in general) is not very good at dealing with course rather than class issues.
So I'm always thinking about what course materials I need to maintain off Canvas so that I can reuse them.
So I might use the Discussion tool to solicit questions for a FAQ page from students. Discussions works great for this if the questions are about the class rather than about the course. I do a lot of current events, and there are events that are current but are similar to past events, and I need to link those. A FAQ page for current events needs to able to note that this news item we have right now is like this other one we had (say) two years ago.
So I'd like to solicit the FAQ inside Discussions for a class, export it to where I organize my course, work on it, and then import it back into Discussions.
Could you elaborate a bit more? I have been teaching online for almost 20 years, and find Canvas to be very good at dealing with "courses", and an excellent repository of all my course materials and activities. Even for courses with both a lab and a lecture component. Of course Canvas cannot support a physical lab space, but it can support the learning documentation, assignments and assessments, and document files associated with a lab component.
If you could tell me what you find missing, I might be able to advise you on how you might be able to make better use of Canvas for courses.