Threads

[PaulaDeckard]

Not even real sure it is that selection but it is for my Masters program at ASU in Arkansas.......on the discussion board, I am looking for create thread - how do I do that?  I can NOT find that button any where.  On Blackboard - it was in the middle of the page but I am NOT finding CREATE thread anywhere......I see where I can reply to others messages but I can NOT create my own.  HELP!!!!!

[Chris_Hofer]

Hi @PaulaDeckard ...

Could you please help to clarify...are you an instructor or a student?  If you are an instructor, are you looking to create a new discussion topic in your course?  If so, you'd want to follow the steps in this Guide: How do I create a discussion as an instructor?.  If you are a student and you want to reply to a discussion topic in your course, you would want to follow this Guide: How do I reply to a discussion as a student?.

Here's a couple video tutorials that might help, too:

• Discussions Overview (Instructors)
• Discussions Overview (Students)

Sing out if you have any questions...thanks!

[PeggyR]

I'm an instructor new to Canvas and also confused about this. I want to be able to create threads within a single discussion board forum. For example, in Blackboard, I have a discussion forum called "Memory Devices." Within that forum, I've created several different threads, like "Memory Devices for Classification Categories," and "Memory Devices for DNA Complementary Bases." Students then post examples of memory devices they have thought of in those various threads. But I don't see any way to do that in Canvas.

[Chris_Hofer · Accepted solution]

@PeggyR ...

Thanks for providing your example.  Discussion topics in Canvas don't work exactly how you've expereinced them in Blackboard.  Discussion topics in Canvas are designed, generally, to be one per topic.  One of the reasons for this is because you can mark any individual discussion topic as "Graded" so that it would appear in your course Gradebook.  If you had one Discussion topic with several different threads in it, and you made that single topic graded, how would students know which thread within the topic was that one that was graded?  That is just one initial thought I had related to Discussion topics.  So, my recommendation is to create as many Discussion topics as you need (ex: one for "Memory Devices for Classification Categories", another for "Memory Devices for DNA Complementary Bases", etc.), and then put those topics into the modules of your "Modules" index page...in the order that you want.

Now...all that being said, you *could* create a single Discussion topic in your Canvas course.  Call it "Memory Devices", for example.  Then, before you "publish" the topic so that students can start replying, you could create several replies within that topic that are all from you.  See the below screenshot:

In each reply that I created, I had to do all the resizing and bolding of the font to make it look like a topic heading.  Also, you'll notice that there is a "Reply" link under each of my replies.  These are what the students would use to reply to each of your replies.  However, there is also a "Reply" button at the top of the Discussion topic.  You can't get rid of this, and some students might select this button instead of the "Reply" links.  That "Reply" button would put any student replies at the same level of indentation as your original replies...assuming that you were wanting to keep all the replies in a threaded format.

So, as you can see, there would be a little extra work involved here, and doing it this way could REALLY make your discussion topics very long.  That's yet another reason why keeping each topic in its own Discussion item is a much better way to go, IMHO.

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

[PeggyR]

Thank you for your reply, Chris. I'm not sure I understand the grading issue. In Blackboard, every time a student makes a post in a discussion forum that is worth points, I receive an email and I grade that student's submission.

I guess the inability to easily create separate threads in a discussion forum is just one of several things that I find a bit disappointing about Canvas. But the willingness of people like you in the Canvas Community to reply so quickly and throughly is a big plus.

[Chris_Hofer]

@PeggyR ...

Yup...you can certainly set up your Canvas notifications so that you get an e-mail when there are new replies to your discussion topics (graded or non-graded discussion topics).  Those settings are all configured if you go to your "Account" >> "Notifications" screen.  There are three rows under the heading "Discussions" that you can configure for different notifications.

If we go back to the example screenshot I included earlier, the "Memory Devices" is just one Discussion topic in Canvas, and then both of my replies to that topic.  If I had wanted this topic to be graded, Canvas doesn't really distinguish between the two replies and any of the student responses within them.  So, if the entire "Memory Devices" Discussion topic was worth 10 points, you're giving points for the topic as a whole.  (I'm struggling a bit to explain this myself, but I hope this is making some sense?)

Try using this Guide to create each of your Discussion topics:

How do I create a discussion as an instructor?

Then, you can add those topics to your course modules:

How do I add course content as module items? (Look at the section on "Add Existing Item" about half-way down...since your topics will already exist.)

I hope this extra bit of info will help in some way.

[PeggyR]

Thanks again, Chris. I decided to set it up the way you first suggested. 🙂

I also appreciate the information about how to get email notifications when replies are added. I hadn't yet found that in Canvas, so I'm glad to know it's there. 

[Chris_Hofer]

You're welcome, @PeggyR ...

I should have also included a Guide for the "Notifications" screen as well.

• How do I manage my Canvas notification settings as... - Instructure Community - 1222
• How do I manage notifications for a single course ... - Instructure Community - 1008

You can also add additional e-mail addresses (such as a personal e-mail address) if you wanted to also be notified to that account, too.  You can follow the instructions in the below Guide, and then go back to your "Notifications" screen.  A new column will be displayed for the e-mail address you added, and you can then set up the frequency of those notifications as well.

• How do I add an additional email address as a cont... - Instructure Community - 1221

Have a great weekend!

[ayocom1]

Hi @Chris_Hofer, not a question, but a follow up observation / another use case example.

I'm trying to set up a discussion on one main topic (planetary exploration), but allow students options for the sub-topic (different types of objects e.g. terrestrial planets, giant planets, asteroids, KBOs, etc). I see two ways to do this: 

1. Set up each sub-topic as a thread (that I start) within the main discussion, as your screenshot suggests as a possibility.

2. Set up a different discussion for each sub-topic.

The grading for this is actually more confusing if I choose option (2) which is what you suggested to others here. Here's why:

• For assignments, my TA team usually grades a specific assigned chunk of names in SpeedGrader. (The lack of a way to distribute grading equally for each assignment, regardless of how many students in each chunk of names submits, is another problem we have. )
• If I use the workaround to post 5 discussion posts for the 5 sub-topics I want, but then students choose topics unevenly, we will have to kludge together a different method to figure out how to split up the grading.
• I could mark all 5 as graded, but then if students actually only need to respond to one, that is more confusing on their end.

Why would it not be sensible to actually set up sub-topics? As others note, other LMSs including Moodle do that, and it is what I think most people would expect coming from discussion forums elsewhere on the web.

[Chris_Hofer]

@ayocom1 ...

---

Why would it not be sensible to actually set up sub-topics? As others note, other LMSs including Moodle do that, and it is what I think most people would expect coming from discussion forums elsewhere on the web.

---

I understand what you are saying.  However, if you set up one discussion topic in Canvas with replies as your "sub topics" and the entire topic was set as graded, how would you know which of the "sub topics" was worth more points?  (Maybe you'd have one sub-topic worth more point than the other.)  In the gradebook, you're giving one grade for the entire topic...not just for one "sub topic" within the discussion topic.

When I worked at a college in Wisconsin, prior to us using Canvas as our LMS, we had been using a LMS called Pearson eCollege's LearningStudio.  It sounds like your experiences with discussion board sub topics were similar to what we also had with LearningStudio.  But, when we migrated to Canvas, all our sub topics were placed in the main discussion prompt area (and not as separate replies like I showed in my screenshot above).  So, it was a lot of manual work on our part to separate all of those out.

If you would like to see a sub topic structure in Canvas discussions, you might want to submit a new idea here in the Community so that it can be evaluated.  Instructure Community Guide - Instructure Community (canvaslms.com)  Check out the section on "Ideas and Themes" in that link, and take a look at the link on how to create new ideas.

I hope this will help in some way.

[ayocom1]

I understand your point in the event that some threads would be worth more - but in my case, that is not what I had in mind. A single rubric will be used to grade the discussion posts (about solar system exploration), and each thread is simply used to organize student replies so that different solar system bodies (each planet, asteroids, etc) is grouped together. Having a different discussion for each body would lead to more "stuff" in the gradebook, which is hard enough to navigate as it is.

Thanks for the link. If I have the time and energy, I might submit sub topics and maybe I'll cruise around all of the existing community discussions about sub topics to find people to rally around the idea (if we can leave additional upvotes or comments on Ideas). As it is though, I think my current solution is good enough for me.