Needed: journal or one-on-one discussion with students feature

[AkwasiOpoku-Dak]

Over the past term, I’ve explored multiple Canvas tools to build a “student channel” workflow: a space where students can post updates or reflections and receive timely, individualized responses. My goal was to create a system that supports:

• Private, threaded dialogue.

• Instructor notifications for new student posts.

• Visibility tracking or status indicators in CANVAS to ensure no student posts are missed.

• Integration with grading workflows in the event the instructor wants to assign a grade for the student's ongoing interaction with them.

Despite trying several approaches, I found that no single Canvas feature fully supports this use case, which seems to be a core aspect of teaching. Below is a summary of the methods I tested and their limitations:

Assignment comments -- students do not necessarily look at or see instructor comments, and notifications to the instructor regarding new student comments are only via email/push and can be easily missed. There is no notification in the CANVAS system that a student left a comment.

Group discussion -- I tried creating group discussions with one student per group. Instructors cannot subscribe to group discussions so there is no way for me to be alerted of a student post.

Canvas Inbox (Conversations) -- These show up as one single long thread and therefore are not user friendly for a back and forth semester long format. They also do not support multiple conversation threads.

As you can see, I've tried many workarounds and hit impasses along the way. There seems to be no way to achieve a reliable, structured, one-on-one interaction with students in CANVAS. Please let me know if I am mistaken. Otherwise, this is a feature I would like to request.

Thanks!

Akwasi Opoku-Dakwa

[james_whalley]

@AkwasiOpoku-Dak This is a great idea and a feature that I missed when I moved over from Blackboard. I am part of the testing for the new way of intaking product ideas and have submitted this idea as part of that.

[AkwasiOpoku-Dak]

Thank you!

[sharon_kitching]

Have you tried the new portfolio tool? Would might work depending on what level of reflection you are after.  Alternatively I wonder if a quiz with an essay question would do the trick/ and set the grade to be complete/incomplete. If the student could redo the quiz multiple times, you'd have a log of the previous entries (and so would they). 

[AkwasiOpoku-Dak]

Thanks. I appreciate the quick response and suggestions.

It looks like my institution may have disabled the Portfolio feature as it does not show up in my Account menu under "settings".

I appreciate the quiz suggestion. However, as I mentioned, students often miss comments posted on assignments, including quizzes. I've never had a student see a comment made on a specific question/answer (i.e., in the question feedback comments), so I've stopped using that feature. And for the assignment level comments, the link between a student response / question, and the related comment would be not as clear as in a discussion, that threaded structure would be missing. Also, students might not see those assignment level comments either.

I had AI create the table below of how students are notified of comments in CANVAS. Assuming it is accurate, students would only receive an email about a quiz comment if they have enabled the email notification feature. Otherwise, the update goes to their CANVAS inbox, which they do not all check.

The one thing the students do check is their To Do list. So, the wishlist would be to have some kind of notification of comments appear there.

[paul_fynn]

One approach is to auto create groups of one in people view. Then create a group discussion for that Group Set. Each student can then have a discussion with themselves (aka journal) visible only to them and the teaching team.

Recent discussion updates *should* now allow intermediate deadlines, but I haven't looked into this yet.