Group Discussion with Checkpoints is not working

[sbing]

We turned on the feature to allow checkpoints yesterday. We have faculty who you use group discussions to keep their clinical groups together for grading. When you go in to click "Assign graded checkpoints" the group set goes away. When I save and go out there is no group set for me to see for the discussion, as compared to those that are set up as group discussions and assign graded checkpoints is not selected.

I did see where someone else had posted about this and it was being reviewed by developers. The workaround was to create the discussion, select your group, save and then edit and select to assign graded checkpoints. However, when I try this the groups continue to go away. As in, when I un-check assign graded checkpoints, the group discussion button is not selected and my group is no longer listed.

This is a huge issue for our allied health faculty and I'm hoping someone knows the answer or where this is in being resolved. I tried to go to the original discussions checkpoints thread but it's now closed.

Any and all help would be appreciated.

[dgreene]

We are finding a similar problem. Any help would be appreciated. 

[mwolfenstein]

I'm having trouble finding the post, but groups don't work with checkpoints yet.

[SamGarza1]

Hi @sbing,

At this time, Discussion Checkpoints do not support groups, but we're tracking user interest in this area. 

[CanvasHelpdesk]

We also have this need! Several of our instructors use groups for larger classes and projects. It makes sense to have Checkpoints available for this option! Please see a recent email from a one of our faculty members: 

Hi! According to the Canvas guides, checkpoints are not currently supported with group discussions. I would like to request this feature, as we keep students from different programs in separate discussion groups. However, the ability to assign initial discussion posts and peer replies with different due dates is so helpful for student planning and scheduling purposes. The checkpoints feature also increases student participation in posting peer replies. This is especially helpful when peer replies are graded.

We have courses starting May 7 for which the ability to have graded checkpoints with group discussions would be immensely helpful.

Thank you for your consideration!

[bec_plumbe]

Please count this as a vote for checkpoints in grouped discussions. The fact that these two features don't work together immediately makes the checkpoint feature useless in large classes. I work in an Australian university, which like most unis here is large and has large classes, typically broken into smaller "tutorials" of 25-30. In my area, we use grouped discussions extensively so that students are actually having a discussion with their specific group, not just shouting into the void. And we would really love to be able to use checkpoints in our many graded discussions!

I'm sure there will be many others at Australian universities, and other unis that typically have large classes, who feel the same. 

[LNSiefert]

Please add myself and about 10 faculty member votes to getting the checkpoint grading to work in group discussions as well.  It is very frustrating to have a "new and improved" feature that is not functioning fully.  As the admin, I hesitate to enable new things for this reason.

[Seangt]

sorely needed before we can turn this feature on. 

[estambaugh]

Hi, Sam! We were so excited to start using this feature but it is useless for us unless we can use the Group Discussion setting. We heavily use Discussions in our online courses but have multiple TA groups within each course. Please count this as a vote to have Group Discussions as an option with checkpoints. Thank you!

[Nancy_Webb_CCSF]

Our school uses group discussions heavily and we just turned on checkpoints to discover this limitation.  If there were an idea many of us would vote it up.  @SamGarza1 , has Instructure decided this is a change worth having?  I sure hope so.

[tobe_baeyens]

Hi Sam,

I'd like to strongly echo the sentiments expressed by others in this thread. We would also really appreciate it if the Checkpoints functionality could be made compatible with Group Discussions in Canvas.

The Checkpoints feature is a fantastic addition for structuring discussions with clear due dates for initial posts and replies. Group Discussions are also very usefull to make discussions more meaningfull in large groups.

However, it's a significant drawback (and a major limitation for us) that these two very useful features currently don't work together. This prevents us from effectively using Checkpoints in many of our key discussion assignments. It's also quite confusing for our users when they discover that a feature like Checkpoints is unavailable for Group Discussions.

Please consider this post as another request to prioritize the development and implementation of Checkpoints within Group Discussions. We sincerely hope Instructure will address this.

Thank you for considering this feedback!

Best regards,

[NancyJoLambert]

I LOVE the graded checkpoints added feature! It is super helpful. However, I also need graded checkpoint discussions to allow groups. This is a huge problem. If I assign the discussion to students at the bottom of the graded checkpoint, will Canvas group those students in the discussion by the groups I assigned them to?

 

[NancyJoLambert]

The other idea is to make a discussion question for each Group (Discussion Question 1 Group A, Discussion Questions 1 Group B, etc.) but will that impact my gradebook if I have 3 different groups for one discussion question?

[Nancy_Webb_CCSF]

Hi @NancyJoLambert, nice workaround to create a separate discussion for each group! An assignment only applies to those students to whom it is assigned.  Others won't see it and it won't be in the gradebook for them, so having 3 separate assignments won't mess up your grading as long as each student is only assigned to one of the 3.

Currently it is not easy to Assign to a group, limit it to one group's members.  You can't choose a group in the Assign to field.  Luckily there's a new feature coming, Differentiation tags, which will allow you to "tag" users in People, and Assign to students with that tag.  The feature will be in production on June 21 according to the change log.  

[SamGarza1 · Accepted solution]

Hi @sbing 

Just wanted to provide an update on this. I'm happy to announce that Checkpointed Group Discussions will be supported after the June 18th, 2025 deploy. As long as you have Checkpoints on there's nothing you'll need to do to have group discussions available. Existing checkpointed discussions will also be able to be updated to be group discussions. Keep an eye out for the deploy notes and next week there will be a product blog post with an update which will include a feedback opportunity. 

We appreciate everyone's patience as we've worked on this!

@dgreene @Nancy_Webb_CCSF @mwolfenstein @CanvasHelpdesk @bec_plumbe @LNSiefert @Seangt @estambaugh @tobe_baeyens @NancyJoLambert 

[estambaugh]

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

This is going to be awesome!

[jbielecki]

I have a question about discussions with graded checkpoints. Although the courses where I'm using them haven't started yet (so I can't tell if this will be a problem), I've noticed that on the "Syllabus" page, some of the discussion boards' assignment titles have "Reply to Topic Reply to Topic" added while others have "Required Replies (2) Required Replies (2)" added. I double-checked all of them, and they all seem to be set up the same way. Why are they being tagged differently, and why are the tags appearing twice?

[SamGarza1]

Hi @jbielecki, "Reply to Topic" and "Required Replies" should only show once to let the student know which part of the discussion the due date is related to. I recommend submitting a support ticket for this to be investigated further. 

[bec_plumbe]

This is excellent news! Really appreciate that the team heard our requests on this feature. Thanks everyone for your work. Looking forward to trying out the feature soon!