Discussions - create disable with Discussions - moderate enable

[mathieu]

Discussions - create Disable with Discussions - moderate Enable

At our institution we want to allow teachers to moderate discussions and to create announcements, but in an effort to attain a modicum of order in the discussions we want to disable the ability to create new discussions.  The existing assessment discussions are already instantiated when the course is created, and so as long as a teacher can use the announcements there should be little reason to create a new discussion.

Canvas' permissions in this space make very little practical sense.  The permission 'Discussions - create' doesn't really do anything unless it is paired with 'Discussions - moderate'.  Why is that?  Both permissions "Allows user to add discussions in the discussions page." Why put that in two different permissions? Based on the name, it would seem that disabling "Discussions - create" would... well, disable 'Discussions - create', but it doesn't.  Apparently, you have to also disable 'discussions - moderate', but there are things in there we DO want teachers to be able to do.  How does this make any earthly sense?

Is there another way to achieve this without resorting to hiding the button with Javascript or CSS?

[Bobby2]

HI  @mathieu  Welcome to the Canvas Community. Great to have you on board.

I'm assuming that your courses have already been set up for the teachers and you would prefer that they do not create any other content within them. Would I be on the right track? If that was the case then perhaps as part of your institution's culture certain rules have been set and expectations agreed upon. If it has been decided that a teacher will not create discussions then that is it.

However, as a teacher I would find it particularly confronting not being able to utilise the functionality that Discussions provide. They are so adaptable and flexible, they offer huge potential for a teacher to continually build a community of learners within a course  and encourage the social and academic 'presence' of both students and teachers. I would be lost without Discussions. 

I hope I haven't stirred things up but felt I needed to add my $0.02 worth.

[mathieu]

Hi Bobby,

Thanks for your thoughtful response.  I agree that discussions/forums are very useful for fostering a strong community of inquiry.  I have found them to be unrivalled in the development of critical thinking skills. In fact, we are using discussions for assessed forum activity as setup by the subject matter experts and the instructional designers. We also use announcements allowing for student responses when needed, for example initial introductions.  I would concede, however that in this particular use case, we do lose something where ad hoc learning could occur and indeed preventing students from initiating discussion somewhat flies in the face of a social constructivist pedagogy. But Canvas' organisational tools for discussions makes this impractical (more on that below).

With regard to your suggestion on institutional culture, we could just ask teachers not to create discussions, but that misses the fundamental point about usability in Canvas.  The permissions configuration as far as discussions are concerned are nonsensical. Surely this should be addressed? 

For what it's worth, we wouldn't be too concerned about additional discussion threads if there were more flexibility in terms of the organisational hierarchy.  As summarised here and discussed here and here, Canvas discussions are missing a layer, with the result that additional discussions at the top layer create an untidy space unless it is carefully curated.

Nevertheless, thanks for taking the time to respond. Hopefully, if there are enough people talking about this, the Canvas developers will take notice.

Keep well.