@ 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?

[kcockrill]

@ mentions would be so beneficial!   Students tend to only look at the replies on their own posts, not those of others, but I frequently mention other students in posts.  An @ mention would alert the student that they need to check out this response too.

Also, the ability to link to other posts would be so helpful.  That way, if I already answered a question in another post, I can just put the link to refer the student back to my previous post rather than have to type the answer all over again!@

[jackie]

 @peytoncraighill ​ - any updates on this? We would love to have this feature!!

[pbogart]

A year and a half later: Yes, absolutely. This is my objective too. So many rich connections among students would be possible to facilitate with this  simple functionality.  @vkg ​ at umich.edu, have you by any chance heard of any more recent workarounds?

[dhulsey]

Hi, pamela! Some LTI products support @mentions. If you can do an annotation assignment, Perusall works great and hooks into Canvas via an external tool assignment. Here are some details: Canvas and Perusall​.

[pbogart]

Thanks much, I'll have a look!

[vkg]

I don't have a better workaround, Pamela.  I can absolutely see the pedagogical value you describe.

[Renee_Carney]

  Idea is currently in Product Radar Learn more about this stage...

[cgaudreau]

Any updates on this since 10/16? A lot of Canvas users at the NERCOMP Annual Conference were just talking about how awesome this would be during a session on ways to keep online learners engaged.

[cgaudreau]

 @peytoncraighill ‌, wanted to mention you in case you did not see the previous request.

Thank you!

[laurakgibbs]

Thanks to cgaudreau‌ at a separate discussion (Student Engagement in an Online Course ), I learned about this feature request. I wonder if there has been any progress...? I think this would be a GREAT thing to add to Canvas, and I would hope that it would be the first of many more/better social features.

There was a good discussion about this at a blog post I had written back in 2015 where I posed the question in terms of person-centered streams which I think is a further dimension of this problem (my school was not on Canvas at the time, but I was participating in a cMOOC that used Canvas as a platform). Social sites like Twitter and Google+ use the @ and the @ is a big part of how they work, but more importantly those social networking sites are organized as person-centered streams (blogs, microblogs, whatever you want to call it), as opposed to topic-centered streams (like the venerable discussion board). And of course newer tools like Slack have opened up the landscape even more.

Anyway, here's that blog post, and you'll see comments from  @jared ‌ there. That's always amazed me about Canvas; even before my school went with Canvas, people from Canvas were out there in social spaces eager to have real convos about teaching and learning, not just about tech and products! 🙂

OU Digital Teaching: Thoughts about Choosing, Change, and the 800-Pound LMS Gorilla 

Now my school is on Canvas (yay!), and that's how I ended up here at the Community. I'm trying to get a Connected Learning group going, so if anybody is interested in that, I'll shamelessly put in a plug here for that request:

https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/8128-group-request-connected-learning