[ARCHIVED] Discussion Board Merge?

[rgibson1]

A faculty asks:

"I want to set up ONE discussion forum for Module 2, but want to group my students in THREE groups giving them THREE different questions. The tricky part is, I want all their grades to appear in ONE column in Grade Center (not 3 different columns). How can I do this?

I have already created the 3 separate discussion forums in Module 2. Can you please help make sure that the grades of all students will be seen in just ONE grade column instead of three separate ones which will skew their final TOTAL grade?"

~ Is this even possible?

[ddaniels]

Unfortunately, this is not possible! When you divide in to section groups, the grade books also divide. On a positive, though, the student only sees the one grade and won't see the others. 

Feel free to give your faculty member the link to provide a new idea that can be voted on by the Canvas community: https://community.canvaslms.com/community/ideas/pages/create-idea!input.jspa?containerID=2020&contai...

[kona]

Hey rgibson1! If the discussion has already started, then no, you're locked into three discussions. Yet, this does not mean it will mess up their total grade. Depending on how the Instructor set-up the three discussions, they can either go into the gradebook and for each discussion excuse (EX) the students who didn't need to participate in that discussion. Or, if the Instructor manually added the students to the "Assign To" field in each discussion, then the gradebook would automatically be fine because the students would only be assigned to one discussion and the other discussions wouldn't even show up in their gradebook. Or, if the Instructor set up the three discussions with groups (checked the group discussion box), then they'd need to go in and do the EX (excuse thing) for the discussions each person didn't need to participate in.

Moving forward or if the discussion hasn't started, I would put the students in the correct "Groups" in Canvas and then create ONE discussion with this group set. Because the teacher wants three different prompts - different for each group - I'd recommend having general directions in the body/directions of the discussion and then have the Instructor reply to each group discussion (there will technically be three within that one discussion) with the prompt that the specific group should be talking about. I'd probably highlight this prompt text with yellow or make it a different color and bold to bring attention to the question for the students. 

Hope this helps! Kona