Managing Discussions in Faculty Lounge (long running course)

[franke]

Hi all,

I'm working to help a staff member who manages the Faculty Lounge for all online faculty at our college.  Among other things, right now, her most pressing issue is managing all of the discussion forums among faculty members.  Currently the discussions in the Faculty Lounge are:

• Dealing with Academic Dishonesty
• Conducting & Managing Discussions
• Encouraging Discussion
• Canvas Thoughts
• Social Media in your Class(es)
• Making Your Course Successful
• Water Cooler (misc.)
• Faculty Lounge Suggestion Box
• Way to Go!
• Dealing with Difficult Students
• Teaching Small Classes
• Teaching Large Classes
• Assessing Student Learning
• When Teaching Grows Tired
• Solving Puzzles
• Academic and Student Services: Communicate with the Advising Team
• Deans and Program Directors: Communicate with the Deans and Program Directors
• eLearning Services: Communicate with the eLearning Team
• Career Coaching: Communicate with Career Advisors

The problem lies in the need to have to create NEW discussions of the same topic each 8 months or so after the discussions have grown and they need to start over again.  She is currently creating new discussion forums for each topic and closing the old discussions for comments but leaving them open in case people want to still view the content (Which is often asked for by faculty).  These discussions are all fairly well participated in--mostly by new faculty who are required to post here as part of their required orientation course in Canvas.

Does anyone have suggestions on dealing with a better solution to this issue?  She's spending way too much time re-creating the new discussion forums every 8 months or so as well as needing to maintain all the other ongoing and open discussions.  I feel like there has got to be a better way!  I've attached a screenshot of what the discussions look like now.

Thanks for any advice you can give!

-Emily

[kona]

 @franke ​, has she thought of sharing the discussions in Commons (even just with herself)? Then she could copy them over any time she wanted to "reset" things. Granted she might still need to tweak the settings, but at least she wouldn't need to recreate every discussion.

Beyond the creating of the discussions are there any other problems with the managing of this course?

[franke]

Hi  @kona ,

Thanks for your quick response!  We actually have chosen to not enable Commons at our institution as of yet, but it might be something we can consider again in the future.  This was mostly due to the fact that we already have a repository of sorts within our Canvas instance and introducing Commons might not be as beneficial for our community.

In answer to your question about other problems, yes indeed!  There are plenty of issues with the overall management of the course that in some ways I'm tempted to suggest another platform (like Wordpress maybe?) even though I hate to go away from Canvas.  It's the type of course that can fill up with lots of articles, discussions, etc. very quickly and housing them all in a course in the best possible way (where instructors can easily search for things) becomes tedious and time consuming.  So, it's a beast of course right now and that's a bigger issue of course.  Most pressing issue at present is the management of the discussions, new and old.

-Emily

[jamely]

Sounds like you need a full community hosting, like this Canvas community hosted by Jive! I understand your reluctance to add another area that teachers have to check, though. Maybe you could have an iframe or the ReDirect LTI so that it was accessible from one page. Information management and organization is a huge job. Good luck with it!

[Robbie_Grant]

 @franke ,

We are giving the Instructional Designers area a little bit of love and just want to check in with you.  This will also bring this question new attention. 

Were you able to find an answer to your question? I am going to go ahead and mark this question as answered because there hasn't been any more activity in a while so I assume that you have the information that you need. If you still have a question about this or if you have information that you would like to share with the community, by all means, please do come back and leave a comment.  Also, if this question has been answered by one of the previous replies, please feel free to mark that answer as correct.

Robbie