[Discussions] See all of a student's posts together

[david8]

In order to assess and grade a student on participation in the discussion boards, it would be helpful to be able to see all of that student's posts aggregated on a single page.

• Of course the replies will be out of context, but that would still be helpful, especially if there were a "see in context" button on each response by the student.
• It would be helpful if each post came with the basic metadata, including the subject of the thread in which it was embedded if it's a response
• As an option, perhaps one could filter these to see only the top level posts by any particular student. 

[tgrochowski]

Is that for each individual discussion?  That's not the same thing as seeing every single discussion post, from all the discussions (I have about fifteen separate discussions in a typical course) for each student, on a single web page for each student, as in Blackboard's Performance Dashboard. If you do grade discussions, you can see each person's post, but what about the whole picture, across all discussions? Relatedly, Canvas Analytics considers each assignment submission a "participation." The Analytics page does not make any distinction in the "participation" column between a discussion post and an assignment submission.  If you have a lot of assignments and expect a lot of discussion, you end up doing a lot more unnecessary math: you have to look at your total participations and subtract all submissions. It's not especially difficult math but imagine doing that for 40 students (I have two online sections of a fairly popular course) and doing it about every other week.  That's time wasted.

[Steven_S]

Yes that is for individual discussions; I did not recognize any mention of wanting all posts from all discussions to be grouped together in the original idea.  All the posts from one student in an individual discussion are displayed together in the speedgrader.  I generally run about 12 graded discussions in a 15 week course, essentially one discussion per week except for exam weeks. I basically grade one discussion per week for up to 25 students per class, and so I can easily imagine the work required

My discussions are graded, but if yours are not you can recreate the same effect by creating "graded" discussions and putting them in an assignment group weighted at zero percent of the total grade.  (If you do not already weight your grades using assignment groups, just put everything else in a group weighted at 100% of the grade.) 

When grading in speedgrader, I see all posts in a specific discussion from an individual student.  The header to each post is a link that replaces that list with the complete discussion, still within speedgrader, so that I can see the posts in context.  This could be improved by jumping me to the specific post I clicked and allowing me to toggle back to the initial list, but at least the function is there. 

I set due dates for the discussions aligned with the topics we are covering, and wait until after the due date to grade the discussion.  At that point all participation that will count towards that specific discussion has been completed.  This gives me a weekly, big picture of student discussion participation, because I give them a grade once a week in the "current" discussion. It sounds like you might grade discussion participation differently but there are still options available to you.

Issuing only one grade for all student discussion posts in the semester has the draw back of not allowing them to learn from mistakes, but you could accomplish this by waiting until the end of the semester to grade discussions.

I have not found the analytics to be the best measure of participation, but I did not put a great deal of time into that once I learned that some mobile interactions are not tracked. It sounds like you've worked out a solution, but setting up "graded" discussions in a zero percent assignment group might give you an easier to use biweekly tracking tool. 

• You can track discussion participation biweekly in a way that is similar to how it sounds like you are using analytics...  Basically it would mean "grading" the discussions grouped into a zero percent group, and then entering the appropriate composite grade where you are currently entering scores for discussion participation.
• There is an icon change similar to what you see with an assignment submission, so you would only need to "grade" discussions where you see posts. 
• I would suggest keeping the discussions set to a manual grade posting policy, so that students are not confused by seeing scores there.  They can focus on the biweekly composite grade instead.
• After you enter the composite grade, you can reset the discussions for the next discussion participation score by using the "set default grade" option in the three dot menu at the top of each assignment in the gradebook.  Set each to zero, and use the option to replace existing grades. 
• As students post for the next grading period these zeros will be replaced by the new submission icon, so that once again it is clear which discussions need to be "graded" in the next grading period.

I know it's not the same as seeing all fifteen discussions on the same page, but it has the added benefit of keeping all posts organized by topic without having to cross-reference the main topic.  Grading this way is also not limited to counting the number of posts the way the analytics page is.  After all, the analytics page cannot differentiate a blank post from a long, detailed post. 

[salwakhan]

I very much need this feature! I would also like the ability to see "statistics" from Discussions, so that I could go to one place and see how many posts each student had made over the course of the semester. This is a feature I had in our old system which was Sakai.

How do we find out whether Canvas is working on this feature, if at all? It has been three years since the post by David.

[JustinShewell]

I would appreciate the ability to view non-graded discussions in the same way you can using SpeedGrader. I don't want to have a lot of "graded" discussions worth 0 points in my gradebook or in the list of grades for the students when I don't grade individual discussion posts.

[bbuescher]

As an instructor I use discussions to do most of my beyond-the-assigned-readings teaching on the Canvas platform. I actively participate in the weekly discussion streams in order to guide learning, and I grant significant course credit for solid participation. 

Currently, evaluating each student at the end of the term takes an unreasonable amount of time and energy. The only options I have to review overall participation is either to grade each discussion--doing so happens outside the discussion stream and requires unnecessary redundancy to also see the student's work in context-- or to go back through and search each student within each discussion to evaluate effectiveness of participation. 

I would like a tool that would allow me to see all the discussion postings a student has made throughout the course at one time. 

Searching all discussions by author/student is a tool I use/have used to great effect on other learning platforms.

Having such a resource in Canvas would greatly benefit my ability to evaluate student mastery of course objectives.

[ChrisMedina]

Yes this is needed as a feature for faculty to properly access their students. 

[kwhitney1]

Yes, @bbuescher, this is a needed feature for all of the above reasons. For my own uses, I particularly want to see how their expression of expertise in the subject matter has grown over the term.

[bbuescher]

Yes kwhitney1, visualizing progress is perhaps the most important benefit to having the full term view in a single place.

[cdraney]

I'm heartened to see the recent comments and activity on this thread, but disheartened that the thread is some 3-4 years old without action. 

What's the next step for getting this more solidly on Instructure's radar as a feature request?