How to hide Discussion forum responses from teachers if the students are Concluded in the course

[EvanDonovan]

Is it possible to hide Discussion forum responses from Teachers if the students are Concluded in the course?

We have a course in our Canvas called Faculty 101 which is a training course for our faculty.

We have had many faculty take this course in the past few years, so the Discussion forums are getting too lengthy for the course Teachers to go through to identify new posts.

I thought I could fix this by Concluding the students who have completed the course. However, their posts still show up in the forum.

Note that I have full administrative access to Canvas.

[mzimmerman]

Hi @EvanDonovan 

I think the only way to remove the previous faculty's posts from the discussion board is actually to remove them from the course.  Neither concluding their enrollment nor deactivating them seems to do the trick.

If you really wanted to preserve their responses/participation in the course, but not have them show for the teachers, maybe you create a new "Completed" section in the course, move all the to previous participants to the "Completed" section, and set the enrollments for the current teachers (and maybe current students) to "Limit this user to only see fellow section users"...

[EvanDonovan]

Hi @mzimmerman , thanks for your reply.

If I removed them from the course, would that delete their forum responses and assignment submissions from Canvas? We still need to be able to access them as administrators for archival purposes only, but just not have the Teacher of the course see them.

Note that prior to posting this question, I already created a Completed section in the course and moved all previous participants to that section. Then I set the enrollments for current Teachers to "Limit this user to only see fellow section users". The Concluded students' Discussion posts are still visible to the Teachers, even those their assignment submissions are not.

[mzimmerman · Accepted solution]

Hi @EvanDonovan 

Actually, I just did some more testing, and it looks like even deleting them from the course does not remove their discussion board replies! 

And I also tested and duplicated your results with setting the teachers to only be able to view folks from their section--I'd tested it with assignments/gradebook/etc., but hadn't actually tested it in the discussion board.  Sorry, it was an idea, but that's disappointing!

[EvanDonovan]

Thanks @mzimmerman , I will file this as a feature request - i.e. that Concluded students could have their forum replies hidden in the discussion board (or alternatively, that students who are in a hidden section could optionally not have their forum posts show).

[EvanDonovan]

@chriscas , it seems that both I and @mzimmerman tested this and it didn't work because limiting users per section works on assignments but not on discussion posts.

For now, our instructor for this course has said he will just deal with the large forums.

If they start getting too overwhelming, I've told him we can just create a new instance of the course itself, with the same content, and just add new faculty to that instance instead of the old one.

[chriscas]

Well gosh, after testing again today, you are totally right.  It's been years since I've actually looked at this, and I think functionality may have changed over time!  I learned something new today, and this revelation may cause me to revisit some of our current Canvas procedures in light of FERPA and other guidelines.  I'm going to delete my incorrect reply as to not confuse anyone else in the future!