Improve the user experience with discussions to provide for more meaningful discourse among course participants

[jsailor]

Theme Overview

Improved interactions and flexibility in settings for discussions encourage deeper discourse, leading to more meaningful exchanges and opportunities to learn with and from other class participants.

What value could this provide to users?

• Provide for more flexibility in viewing preferences
  
• Update workflows to be more efficient and limit clicks
  
• Improve the interface to include clear calls to action and improved usability
• Improve student interaction and timelines for participation through added capability of multiple due dates or checkpoints
• Improved grading and feedback workflows
  
• Additional reporting options to understand user activity and edit history
  
• More granular settings and role permissions within discussions
  
• Better default controls and actions

Why was this theme chosen to open for voting?

April 2023 • We know there is room for improvement with the Discussions Redesign, and through deeper discovery, we would like to better understand users’ needs when it comes to more meaningful discourse.

Why was this theme chosen for prioritization?

June 2023 • Improving the user experience with discussions continues to be one of the top requests among our users as well as a major UX/UI pain point. In addition to being ranked within the top 3 themes in this round of voting, internal team members report that questions about the redesign and missing functionality that requires users to partner with 3rd party vendors are topics on nearly every client call with clients in HE and International regions. While we won’t be able to address every idea in this theme, we believe we can deliver value to enable more meaningful discourse.

[ProductPanda]

Note from Instructure

April 2023 • This theme was chosen to Open for Voting. 

How do Ideas and Themes work in the Instructure Community? 

How do I participate with themes? 

[canvas_admin]

As I've mentioned with in private conversation with Instructure, Discussions really needs to be prioritized. I think it stinks that the discussions project team as taken off of discussions to focus on new quizzes.

Discussions Redesign gets some things right like: the ability to sort newest to oldest, tagging, and liking.

However, what the redesign took away outweighs the positive additions. Namely, the removal of threaded discussions was a huge negative in our mind. The slideout is clunky and actually requires more clicks to deep dive into replies. Additionally, clicking outside the slideout causes you to lose whatever you were typing.

I'd love to see this theme get the most votes so that Instructure could put the design team BACK on the project.

What's frustrating is that we have been asking Instructure for better discussion functionality since 2013 and this is what we got. We're even looking at third parties to incorporate with our Canvas instance to stop using Canvas discussions altogether unless something is done about this.

[AnnLoomis]

I think most Canvas users agree that Discussions needs a lot of work. However, with 39 Ideas grouped under this Theme, it's unclear to me what my vote means. How is a vote on the Theme going to provide Instructure with "deeper discovery" to help "better understand users’ needs when it comes to more meaningful discourse"? It is a big ask to require users to wade through 39 often disparate Ideas and provide individual comments on each to help Instructure understand our priorities. It would be really helpful to have some way to rank order of priority other than by commenting on individual ideas.

Even better would be to break a Theme down into smaller chunks when it contains this many Ideas. Instructure has already laid the framework for more specific Discussion sub-Themes above:

• "Provide for more flexibility in viewing preferences
  
• Update workflows to be more efficient and limit clicks
  
• Improve the interface to include clear calls to action and improved usability
• Improve student interaction and timelines for participation through added capability of multiple due dates or checkpoints
• Improved grading and feedback workflows
  
• Additional reporting options to understand user activity and edit history
  
• More granular settings and role permissions within discussions
  
• Better default controls and actions"

To me, a vote for specific Discussion Themes with a smaller number of closely related Ideas in each Theme would be much more meaningful and make me feel that my time was better spent. I like the Ideas and Themes redesign in theory but I think a little more granularity for the larger Themes might provide better info to guide Instructure priorities.

[IanGoh]

Got this from a third party vendor: 

One major problem is that the Canvas discussion tool is so outdated that it doesn't actually foster true discussion. Instead, it's just another box for students to check off their to-do lists.

As a result, students are less engaged in online courses, and the opportunity to foster inclusive learning communities for your students is missed.

Are you experiencing this in the courses you support? …

[JamesSekcienski]

@canvas_admin I agree that it was frustrating to learn that the dev team assigned to work on the Discussion Board re-design was suddenly removed from the project with no promise of return anytime soon.  While I wasn't happy with all the design choices, there were certainly features that I was looking forward to seeing.  The anonymous feature was nice to help with students that may not feel comfortable posting "publicly" for everyone to see and comment on.  I was also looking forward to seeing the ability to assign multiple due dates to help with setting a due date for the initial post and a due date for peer responses.  I don't know how serious it was being considered, but incorporating Turnitin with discussion boards has been highly desired by some faculty too.

@AnnLoomis I 100% agree with you that this theme and some others are too broad and have so many ideas attached that you have no idea what you are actually voting to support.  I like how you have suggested some more granular themes related to discussion boards that would help clarify what you are voting to support the development of in the future.

@IanGoh I agree that discussions often seem like a checkbox to students rather than fostering authenticate discussion among the students.  Once it is off of their To Do list, they are usually done with it even if other students are replying with follow-up questions.  I don't know that the tool itself is fully to blame, but have you seen other discussion tools that foster better student engagement?  If so, could you share feature(s) that you feel support the improved student engagement and how they do it?

[akhuebel]

Multiple due dates and improvements to how I view student submissions in SpeedGrader are my priorities for discussions.  I'm tired of looking at a student's submission in SpeedGrader and having no idea who they are responding to.

[ProductPanda]

Status changed to: Post Voting Review

[KristinL]

Status changed to: Prioritized

[james_whalley]

Wow! 43 feature ideas in this theme. How will you choose which ones to focus on? Here at Cornell, the following are ones I know our faculty care about:

- [Assignments] Automatic Grading

- [Discussions] Multiple Due Dates (checkpoints) for Discussions

- [External Tools] Enable Turnitin for Discussion Posts

- [Discussions] Option for setting a number of discussion posts required before being flagged for grad...

[sbarhoum]

We are hoping for  [Discussions] Multiple Due Dates (checkpoints) for Discussions as well. The sooner the better.

[sbarhoum]

@jsailor 

Can you please prioritize  [Discussions] Multiple Due Dates (checkpoints) for Discussions for those of us that have been asking for it since 2015? It is an absolute necessity as a teacher and student.

[Jeff_F]

@jsailor 

This product is looking pretty nifty...   https://harmonizelearning.com/product/

• Students see milestones
• Autograding & Canvas integration
• TII integration for plagiarism (and ChatGPT) detection
• Multiple due dates
• Trained ChatGPT question prompt generator (tied to Bloom's Taxonomy)
• Polling
• Reactions and tagging
• Multimedia enabled
• Anonymous posting
• Groups
• Accessible

[jsailor]

Hi, @Jeff_F. Yes, I've spent some time exploring Harmonize over the past few months. It does have a lot of great features and it also seems to integrate well with Canvas. 

[JamesSekcienski]

@jsailor 

Are there any details available about what is being prioritized and/or developed for this theme?

[jsailor]

@JamesSekcienski, thank you for the call out. Our Collaborations team has been hard at work with discovery, design, and technical planning. Our awesome product manager, @SamGarza1 will be sharing additional details in the coming weeks, but we have been working on two specific projects that I'll call out. First, we will soon release a Discussion Entry Version History which will allow instructors to see the history for a discussion reply which was edited, including when it was posted/edited and the content included. Second, we are working on a checkpoints feature (aka multiple due dates), which will allow for separate due dates for the initial response to a discussion and the subsequent replies required. 

[JamesSekcienski]

@jsailor 

Thank you for sharing!  These are both useful features and I look forward to taking advantage of them when they become available.

[JamesSekcienski]

@SamGarza1 

Are there any new updates on what is being developed for this theme?

[SamGarza1]

Hi @JamesSekcienski, thanks for asking! Progress on this theme is going well and new work is being added to the Discussions Redesign feature preview. You can take a look at this blog for a review of what work has already been completed and is available in the redesign. Discussion Entry Version History or Edit History will be available on production in the redesign on November 8th and our team is making great progress on checkpoints (aka multiple due dates) for discussions. There will be a few more blogs in the next few weeks announcing updates and functionality so keep an eye out. 

[JamesSekcienski]

@SamGarza1 

Thank you for sharing an update about this theme!  I greatly appreciate you sharing some specifics about items that are in the works and I look forward to learning more about them.

That is great news that the Discussion Entry Version History/Edit History is coming soon.  Will this only be available for discussions using the new design or will it work with the old version too?  I'll be interested to see how this data is represented in the API too.

We are also excited about checkpoints and looking forward to that release!  It has been something instructors have desired for a while and we are glad to know you are making great progress on it.