[Discussions] Students Organise Discussions into Topics or Folders

[dominiquel]

The idea: Our students (higher education: BA, MBA) have recently raised the following feedback: "discussions are disorganised. There is a mix of posts from the LEX team (student support), academics (teachers), in-chapter quizzes, (graded discussions), etc. How do we differentiate them at a glance?"

The concept: There are 2 ways the students could organise the Discussions:

1. Use the filter at the top to only view specific types of discussions i.e. filter it by discussions posted by their academic (users with a teacher role), discussions posted by their classmates (users with a student role), or filter by graded discussions only
2. Add a "+ Discussion folder" button. This way discussions can be organised the way they want. They can use it the same way as an Outlook folder pane so that the folders can be expanded or minimized.

[l_lucas]

I think this sounds like a useful idea - but for shear volume of messages in a busy forum - what Canvas desperately needs is to have pagination in forums.

Our college has busy forums that can take up to a minute to load because there are so many messages in the forum - if it loaded a page at a time - it could load much faster.

As it stands our students are being turned off the most popular forums because it takes to long for them to load. For students living in rural (low bandwidth) areas this is even worse.

In the era of COVID - busy forums should not be at a go-slow!

[dominiquel]

@l_lucas - yes, I can imagine how things got even busier during COVID.  Students have more questions and they might need to be reassured. It's overwhelming for them to be looking at a list of 50 discussions, especially when there are discussions from different people (teacher, student, admin staff, assessor). How do you sort them out? 

[l_lucas]

Hi @dominiquel  - we have no effective way to sort them in current Canvas forums - accept to 'close for comment' the older ones - and users still have to wait for them to load.

To be honest our biggest issue is not 'sorting' the comments - its that the forum just takes to long to load - so people get frustrated and abandon them.

I cant think of any other forum i visit that does not have pagination to help manage the load (and load times)