How do you create a Journal Club Discussion Board assignment

[s5004675]

I am wanting create a Journal Club assignment discussion board within Canvas.

The concept is that each week a student within their discussion group will be required to write an essay on a specific topic ( a primer essentially). They then post it so that those in their group and view it and make comments. In addition, the student who wrote the Primer also facilitates/moderates the discussion for that week.  Each of the three components ( primer, facilitation and replies to posts) will be graded.

Has anyone created such an assignment or can offer ideas as to how to create it with in Canvas?

[Chris_Hofer · Accepted solution]

Hi there, @s5004675 ...

This sounds possible...provided that the people in one group aren't needing to interact with people in another group.  Here is what you can do:

• Go to your "People" page, and create a new Group Set called "Journal Club" (or whatever name you choose).  How do I add a group set in a course? - Instructure Community
• Within the Group Set, you will be creating your groups of students.  You might call them "Red Team", "Blue Team", "Green Team", "Purple Team", etc.  (Or, use whatever names you want.)  How do I manually create groups in a group set? - Instructure Community
• You can then do a couple different things for assigning students to each of these Groups within the Group Set:
  • How do I create self sign-up groups in a group set... - Instructure Community
  • How do I automatically assign students to groups? - Instructure Community
  • How do I manually assign students to groups? - Instructure Community
  • How do I assign a student leader to a group? - Instructure Community -- You don't necessarily need to set a student as a "leader.  I'm just providing a link to this Guide in case you are learning more about what this option is.
• Now that you have your Group Set configured, create your graded Discussion topic in your course.  Make it a group discussion and select the "Journal Club" Group Set that you created earlier.
  • How do I create a group discussion in a course? - Instructure Community (canvaslms.com)
  • How do I assign a graded discussion to a course gr... - Instructure Community (canvaslms.com)

Once this is all set up, your students will all be in their own groups that you've set up within the Group Set, and they will have separate conversations only with their own groups.  They will not be able to see the discussions of other groups for this particular conversation/assignment.

You can create more than one Group Set on your "People" page...and the groups within those Group Sets can be completely different than what you created for your "Journal Club"....if that was of interest for you.

I hope this will be of some help to you.  Sing out if you have any other questions about this...thanks!

[s5004675]

Many thanks Chris,

That was really helpful. 

I just have a question around grading. Is there a way of grading different aspects of the assignment task within the same group? That is, the assignment calls for:

1. Student 1 to post the essay ( needs to be graded)

2. Student 1 to facilitate the discussion for that week (needs to be graded)

3. Students 2,3,4,5 post replies to the essay (needs to be graded)

Then this is repeated every two weeks until all in the group have posted an essay, facilitated and replied to posts and graded. For example;

1. Student 2 posting essay

2. Student 2 facilitates

3. Students 1,3,4,5 post replies 

Many thanks

Gaery

[Chris_Hofer]

@s5004675 ...

I don't think this is possible.  You'd probably need to set up some additional assignments in your course and make them "No Submission" from the "Submission Type" drop-down list...so that you have placeholders for grades in your Gradebook.

I'd welcome any other suggestions, though...as I was a former Canvas administrator at the college I worked for, and I did not teach courses.  So, I didn't have tons of experience with grading student work/submissions.

[s5004675]

Many thanks again Chris

BW

Gaery