Commenting here to provide additional support and hopefully keep the activity on this thread live enough so other folks can see it and vote on it. Mentions and tagging would be incredibly useful for classroom discussions!
This is not just a "feature request". This is a pedagogical leap forward.
This will help make discussions actual discussions between students (and instructors) and not simply public posts. This will increase student engagement, social presence, and critical thinking.
I teach online courses for transfer students, and many of them contact me asking how to use @mentions because their prior college's LMS could do it and they want to do it in Canvas. Sadly, I inform them that their new LMS can't yet deliver on that technology. I (and my team of 10 instructors) would LOVE this feature. After all, we have the @mention feature on this Canvas Community site... but not yet in the actual Canvas site? If anyone has a work-around, please let me know. Thank you!
I so agree. Without the @mentions, "discussions" are just following the tired old IRE (teacher initiation, student response, and teacher evaluation/feedback) classroom discourse pattern.