Announcement reply function locked after switch to new Discussions

[laura-harste]

A colleague brought this problem to me and I was surprised to not find the solution here.

His concern was that students could no longer reply to his Announcement posts. After searching, we found that they were locked.  Has anyone else found this problem?  This was our solution and it's easy, but it would be nice to have ALL classes fixed and not just his, as I suspect this is systemic.

Go to Announcements

1. Select Announcements
2. Click Unlock

[NoahBoswell]

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Hi, @laura-harste !

Thanks for posting on the Instructure Community.

I conducted some testing and research on this topic myself, and have noticed that when you create a new announcement, ensure "Allow students to comment" is enabled, and that should automatically take care of the problem.

That being said, are the announcements that you are referring to the scheduled for publication for a future date? If that's the case, no students will have access to create replies at all, or even see the announcement.

Let me know if this helps at all, and thanks for mentioning this in the community!

Noah

[laura-harste]

Noah, 

This works for new announcements, that is true.  I should have specified that this happened to announcements that were copied over from another term and some that were created prior to the switch to the new Discussion update.  Allow students to comment" was enabled, and it was enabled in settings.  Somehow the switch locked the functionality.  My colleague reached out to the Helpdesk and they were flummoxed as well, so I was hoping to help for the odd circumstances where this might happen to others.

[NoahBoswell]

Ah… that makes more sense. Yeah, the lock feature will override the allow students to comment feature.

I too am confused to as why the announcement’s discussion became locked when copied over from a different term, especially if it was open for comments before as well. I suppose those created before the new update were just automatically locked during the update and nobody was notified about that.

I honestly don’t know but this is good to know about.