@ mentions in Discussion forums

[hollands]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

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You have a class of 30 and there are three Tom's, how can we differentiate who we are talking to?

[evansall]

This would be great in Canvas for stimulating discussion on the discussion boards as well.  If you want to draw a student's attention to a concept in another student's post, you could tag the student in your response. For example, if I am commenting on student A's post and I want to draw student B's attention to it, I would like to be able to tag student B directly in by response to student A's post.  Otherwise, I don't have any good way to ensure that student B just happens to see student A's post.

[canvas_admin]

I must confess, I might not have seen the advantage of this feature request if it wasn't a present feature in the new community. It has come in quite handy here and I can now see how it would be handy in a classroom.

[carrie]

Canvas Discussions have a Search feature. In my courses I try to establish a cultural norm of addressing a reply to a person, such as "Professsor Soandso, I liked what you said about...." or "Jimmy, I heard you and Joey got a bag of donuts..." that way people in the forum can search and find posts that mention their names.

When I read this Idea, I wonder is it a Notifications feature more so than a Discussions feature?

There are at least two technical needs - 1) provide a picklist of users when typing in a name and 2) send a Notification to the person mentioned (if enabled by the person mentioned).

Does that sound right? Is there anything missing from this idea?

[kona]

Yes, that sounds about right. When someone types "@" followed by letters a list of names from the course roster should populate. When someone is mentioned (using the @) then they should receive a notification.

I think this is useful because if the course is large it's easy to miss if someone mentioned you somewhere and it would be nice to immediately know if you were mentioned. I would especially like this as an instructor because a student could immediately get my attention to a specific post or question. While I like the idea of searching for your name (and this is a great workaround), what if someone mentions you about something important, but you've already "searched" for that day and don't do it again until tomorrow (or the next day, etc)?

[hollands]

No that about hits the nail on the head. Essentially how Jive works. In Jive I can hit the @ symbol and start typing a name it will create a link in the text field to the persons profile as well as send them a notification. I'm not sure about the usefulness of that link feature but when dealing with a class with a lot of posts it can get a tad confusing regarding who is talking to whom. I also think it's worth exploring a bit since most social networks and communication platforms include this feature.

From a grading standpoint this can also help a bit when filtering through the forum to find the context of a response. I've also encouraged courses to include the name but it's happened on more than one occasion where I had two students with the same name so it can quickly get confusing.

[peytoncraighill]

Thanks for the feedback, everybody!

I've added this item to the Discussions backlog and will post back here when the work is estimated. Marking this thread as "Gathering Info" for now.

[peytoncraighill]

Workshopped this last week. Update:

It makes sense to implement this once our messageable user framework is cleaned up in Conversations, as this will use the same search to find users to tag in a discussion, and the messageable user framework isn't nearly as efficient as it should be right now (see: long wait when searching for users to send a message in Conversations).

We are planning on addressing messageable users in 2016, and this can be made a part of that effort, so I will archive this idea now.

If there are any other thoughts on this topic, feel free to keep posting here!

[christopher_boy]

Most classes at Park use the discussion thread for most of the work in the class. It would be beneficial if the notifications could filter out only the content that relates to an individual students response and not all the responses. In most classes there are at least 4 responses from a student in a thread. With 30 students in a class posting 4 times that is 120 notification emails a week for 1 discussion thread. Most classes have at least 2 discussion threads a week causing 240 email notifications that a student receives for 1 class. If a students is in 3 classes that is three classes then that is about 720 notification emails you have to sort through each week.

[cgaudreau]

 @peytoncraighill ​, any new updates from behind-the-scenes by any chance? In the midst of a course redesign, this would be such an awesome feature for a discussion we're building.

[Jeff_F]

Hmm...  perhaps license and rebrand the Jive discussion structure?  It seems to do lots of what is being requested: better differentiation between threads, linking between user posts, etc.  Sorry if that is a nonsensical.