Closing Comments in Community Guides

[CanvasDocTeam]

Since the very first Canvas guide was published, we have invited you all to comment directly on lessons. Your feedback and suggestions have been so helpful in improving the quality of our lessons and have led to many blog posts with innovative ways of using Canvas. Plus, we’ve really enjoyed talking to you directly and getting to know you a little better!

But, as you all know, this year has been full of surprises. With so many people rapidly moving to online learning, we have seen a huge increase in the number of comments. We’re so glad you’re all here and open to asking questions and collaborating! We’ve made some adjustments to our processes and even turned off commenting in certain areas, but our team has still spent an enormous amount of time researching and responding to questions. 

In order to keep our focus on maintaining the documentation you know and love, tackling backlog projects, and creating new resources to help in your learning journey, we have decided to disallow all comments in the Guides space on October 17th. This includes guides for Canvas, Canvas mobile apps, Portfolium, MasteryConnect, Catalog, Commons, and Studio. Please know this is a decision we do not take lightly at all!

Don’t worry, we’re not going to totally disappear from the Community! Each lesson will include a link to a form where you can submit your ideas for ways to improve the Guides or let us know when we’ve made a typo -- we’re human, too! 😉 Additional buttons that link to Q&A and Idea Conversations will also be added to each lesson. We’re gonna spend some time in the Q&A and Idea Conversations forum chatting with you about how you use Canvas and how you think it can be made even better. 

You might be wondering where to ask your questions. You can always start a conversation in the Q&A forums where you will get much better visibility from other educators and our Canvas Coaches and Advocates. A huge benefit of moving questions to that forum is that those posts remain in the Community forever, while Guides comments have always been deleted after a few weeks. Your questions, idea conversations, and discussions will create artifacts for other users to access for a long, long time, which is pretty darn awesome. And if Canvas is misbehaving for some reason, you will of course still have access to our awesome Canvas Support team and/or any local support resources at your institution. 

We sincerely hope this change will be beneficial for everyone and we appreciate your understanding. Stay safe, stay healthy, and keep learning.

Emily Allen & Cody Titmus

Team Leads, Canvas Community