Discussion headers, instructor's name, highlighting

[mpelt]

When setting up a discussion board, the name of the person posting a message shows up on the upper left margin. Is there some way, some setting, that would highlight the instructor's name so that it would stand out from the messages posted by students?

Like just yellow highlight the instructor's name on the messages that the instructor posts.

Can that be done? If so, how be done?

Thanks!

[Chris_Hofer]

Hi @mpelt …

I see what you mean here, and I understand where this might be helpful at the top of a discussion topic in your course.  However, there isn’t anything in the built-in user interface of Canvas at either the instructor level or at the Canvas administrator level I am aware of that would let you modify how the instructor’s name appears and/or is highlighted.  This *may* be possible with some custom CSS or JavaScript code (I think CSS in this case?) that would have to be applied at the Canvas account level, but I wouldn’t know what that code would look like.  Another thing to keep in mind is that if custom code was added to the global CSS and/or JS files at the Canvas account level, then anything that is changed in your course is also changed in every single course within that account.  So, that means you may have other colleagues who teach at your school that like the highlighting, but you may also have instructors that do not.  So, in cases like this, I always recommend having conversations with your school’s Canvas administrator(s) or someone from your school’s Online Learning / eLearning / Distance Education department before making a visible change like this.

Another thing to keep in mind would be color accessibility.  If a highlight color (let’s say yellow) was used, you’d want to make sure that the contrast between the background color and the text color met accessibility standards.  Often, you will see hyperlinks colored a shade of blue.  But, that’s not always the case.  A Canvas admin can choose to set the link color for hyperlinks to any HEX color code via the “Themes” page in the back-end admin pages of Canvas.  For example, maybe the admin wants the link color to match one of the school colors.  So, this would also play a part in the decision for a highlight color as well.  There are sites like: WebAIM: Contrast Checker that help check for color contrast and accessibility.

I’m not sure if you’ve ever submitted ideas for enhancements/improvements before, but there is a space here in the Community to do so.  It used to be called “Feature Ideas”, but just yesterday, the team at Instructure released their new iteration called “Ideas & Themes”, and you can check it out here:

Canvas Ideas and Themes - Instructure Community

You can also check out a blog about the newly revised space by visiting this link:

New Ideas & Themes Now Live - Instructure Community

Hopefully some of what I have shared will be some things for you to ponder and have conversations about with folks at your school.  If there are any questions, please post them as a reply.  Thanks!  Take care…be well.

[mpelt]

Thanks for the reply.

I asked the question because I am seeing it in one university's discussion boards and find it convenient for keeping track of those students I have replied to. However, there is another university which does not have this feature (highlighting the instructor's name at head of discussion message). So I was wondering how to show the "another university" how to enable that feature. Guess I'll have to work my way up through the first university's tech team to figure this out.

Thanks!

M.

[Chris_Hofer]

@mpelt ...

It certainly sounds like the one school has added some kind of custom code to the global CSS and/or the JavaScript file.  Good luck as you continue to have conversations with people at your school.

[DanielLUnowsky]

I would like to have the functionality (a functionality available in other systems) to pin/highlight the posts I make as instructor so all students see mine at the top of a discussion. This was possible in the past with a work around--allowing likes; limiting those to grader only; sorting by likes. This allowed the instructor to make a post, "like" it, then click sort by likes and that instructor authored post would go to the top. For some mysterious reason, Canvas eliminated the "sort by likes" option, and so this functionality is no longer in Canvas (and other systems had easier ways to do this without such a work-around). I would like to see this restored or some other way of allowing instructors to pin their own posts to the top of a discussion added to Canvas. '