Exporting discussion board posts

[pflint]

How do I access all of a student's discussion board posts for exporting into another document?

[KristinL · Accepted solution]

Hi Patricia -

While I haven't done a lot of exploring myself, copying and pasting the student's page from SpeedGrader on a discussion-by-discussion basis is what comes to mind. I know it's laborious and time-consuming. It's not a great long-term solution for instructors and institutions that need routinely need the information. (If another Community member knows a better solution, I'd be excited to learn about it too...even if I wouldn't use it with classes I teach.)

I did a little bit of searching, and I was able to find these Feature Ideas which are related to your question:

https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/1506-export-discussions 

https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/5356-download-discussion-board-posts 

[JohnHogan]

The idea of exporting discussion posts does not seem like a practical modern solution. It seems positively Medieval to me.

[JessicaHos]

This is for anyone still searching for an answer. 

Have your LMS Admin use an API call to export discussion post submissions: 

GET /v1/courses/{course_id}/assignments/{assignment_id}/submissions

Here's the documentation from Canvas for Submissions.

When we pulled the data, any 'span/strong' special HTML came over with it, so it required a little cleaning up before sending it to the department that requested the information. 

[Prof_W]

It's a major weakness in Canvas that we cannot easily extract all of a student's discussion posts or download all of one discussion thread.

Use cases are:

- assembling all of one student's posts to evaluate them, for multiple purposes (revisit all one by one, check for plagiarism/ AI use, discuss with TA's or TA's discuss with professor)

- grading off line (some of us do this)

- grading via pdfs on tablet or even on paper (some of us do this)

- using a paper printout to guide discussions in a seminar

- Faculty preference

[JamesFisher39]

As I pick up this discussion -- I have had the same type of problem related to exporting discussion board posts -- it seems that several "solutions" have been offered, but that they may not be exactly what some people are looking for. In that spirit, I'll offer a "solution" that I use, which also has some limitations. Here's my approach:

1. I use the Chrome plug-in GoFullPage to capture the full discussion board that is displayed on my laptop, taking care to "Expand Threads." This provides a nice pdf document that captures the entire discussion board displayed before you. If the discussion is particularly lengthy, then the software may spilt it into a couple pdfs.

2. You can then print out the pdf or upload it into other applications -- maybe there are applications available online that can convert a pdf to a file that is more easily editable or that you can cut, copy, or paste.

3. I myself attach the pdf of the discussion board to an AI platform, Perplexity is what I currently prefer, and find that I can coax a nice summary of the discussion or a punchy recap of the discussion flow. Going forward, I may ask it to evaluate the quality of particular student posts. But I have also discovered -- at least in my limited trial-and-error experimentation -- that ChatGPT could not read or extract the discussion from the pdf that GoFullPage exported.

4. BTW in my experience the pdfs exported by GoFullPage can be quite large (e.g., 24MB).

I hope this is helpful to some of those with this issue.