Liked posts

[esmith81]

How can you tell who likes your posts?

[Steve_Watts]

Hi  @esmith81 and welcome to the Canvas community

Are you talking about posts to the Canvas community (like the one I'm replying to now) or discussion posts within a Canvas course? I'm guessing you mean course discussions and as far as I know, "likes" are anonymous. All you can see on each post is the number of likes and nobody, teacher or student, can tell which course members those likes came from.

There was a feature idea submitted for this a few months ago. If you think it would be a useful feature, you can vote for it: https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/12461-see-who-likes-a-discussion-post 
Ideas that get enough votes could be considered by Instructure for future development. Interestingly, with idea submissions it *is* possible to see who liked/voted for the idea so it would make sense if the same thing applied within Canvas itself.

[jill_hawkins · Accepted solution]

We had the ability to see who liked our posts in Schoology, and that was very useful. It meant something when I saw a student had liked my comment on a post or had liked an announcement. I knew the student had read my comment or announcement. As far as I'm concerned, that's the whole purpose of the Like feature. 

[James]

 @esmith81  

Information about likes given and unread posts are available only to the user giving the likes, not the recipient. A user who had permissions to act as another user (masquerade) could find out that information, but users without that permission cannot.

Since I'm an admin and have that ability, I've got a script I run for my discussion analysis that iterates through all the users and obtains that information and puts it into a spreadsheet for me. It calculates the percent of messages that are read so I have a sense of how involved they were. It's just two of the factors I use when grading.

I'm going to disagree with  @Steve_Watts , probably because I'm anti-social and don't have any social media accounts, but I have concerns about the ability to be able to see who liked a discussion post within a classroom. It's probably an unfounded fear I have as someone who doesn't understand why people would want to text message the person sitting next to them instead of just talking to them, but I fear it has the potential to turn into a popularity contest or a "why didn't you like my post? -- I'm ending our friendship" thing. That's an exaggerated example of people feeling compelled to like something just because it was their friend who posted it. It decreases the use of likes for awarding quality work and makes it less worthy (I didn't want to say worthless). Even now, it has the potential to turn into a popularity contest, although what I've seen is that the students that post early get read the most and get the most likes, so it's still not quality.

Without thinking about it too deeply about the potential downsides, I've wished that Canvas would expose that information to graders. It would have made my script run a lot faster and researchers could look into the relationships and networks that exist within a class.

[Steve_Watts]

 @James  makes an interesting point about it turning into a popularity contest. I have similar concerns about discussion forums (even the Canvas Community itself!) that use points, badges, league tables etc with rewards given just for participation. There are instances where it's obvious someone has posted a comment just to get a few points and the comment doesn't add anything useful to the discussion.

I still think it would be useful for teachers at least to be able to see who has liked a post. Perhaps the best way to implement this would be with a "Who can see likes" setting, either at course level or on each discussion where the course teacher specifies whether teachers, students or nobody can see which users are responsible for the likes.

[Shar]

I'm only jumping into this discussion because it's an interesting dilemma for an introvert.

I like that in Canvas folks cannot see who Liked their post. I'm an instructional designer, I do not have any direct interaction with students... unless I've pressed Like on their post. That's it, that's all I want to be able to do, especially for discussions where students are problem-solving with each other. I want to give kudos to that, but I do not want them to know it is me! I'm nobody to the student.

I also want to go back to  @James ‌ comment about using percentage read as part of the analytics for grading. That's really intriguing!! I bet it only works for those with admin access eh? So yeah I can see Steve's point about maybe a flag/toggle to allow teachers and TA roles to see how those likes are.

My new adjective lately (this year) is Disruptor. So as the disruptor, wouldn't it be funny to have a dislike button too. Oh man and then the stress that would cause as students suddenly felt hated and not just un-liked.

I like having the Like button on Canvas discussions to avoid those "good job" and "I agree" posts, but that's probably me being naive in thinking that users will use the like button for that reason and not for some kind of social currency thing.

ok, I'm done rambling--time for dinner:smileycheck:
Cheers - Shar

[mjwalsh]

I would like my students to be able to tell when I have liked their post. This would save me from having to actually type a response for every post of my 100 students. As it is now, replying is the only way they know their instructor has read their post.

[jill_hawkins]

Absolutely. 

[BStutzman]

Maybe a feature request could be some sort of a "liked by instructor" button as I agree, it would make it nice for teachers to have the ability to like a post and the student knows it is coming from the teacher specifically.  It would also alert other students to what the teacher may be looking for in a response.

[JimPorto]

I am a newcomer to this discussion and to Canvas (refugee from Sakai).  I would like to use the Like feature to let me know who has read a comment. For example, I have asked students to post an introductory video of themselves and then review all the other posts.  When they complete a review, I have asked them to use the Like feature to indicate that they have done so.  As it stands now, I can't see who is complying and the student cannot tell who has viewed his/her intro.  It seems to me at least having an option to make the Likes non-anonymous would be a useful feature.  jim porto