Hello Community! Over the last two years since this feature group was created, our team has released many updates to the Discussion/Announcement Redesign feature preview. Taking user feedback from this group, the community as a whole, and internally to ensure that what we created didn’t have any loss in functionality but also provided new functionality that our users needed. With our recent deploys which include flexible viewing, inline and split view, and edit history we feel that now the time has come to enforce the redesign so everyone has access.
I’ve included a list of all the functionality that currently exists in the legacy version and what’s new below to give a comprehensive overview of the redesign.
Discussions Redesign
To start we wanted to ensure that there was no loss of functionality between the old and new experience. Users will still be able to set up discussions in the same way with the same requirements.
Discussions
- Users must post before seeing replies
- Reply posts can be marked as read or unread
- Discussion time stamp edit display
- Multiple Due Dates (addition: individual student names are displayed instead of the total number of students)
- Available From and Until Dates
- Previous/Next buttons for Modules
- Group Discussions
- Peer Review
- Add to student to-do list
- View deleted posts (change: deleted posts always show)
- Rubrics
Once we were sure that no functionality would be lost, we shifted our focus to new functionality that we could add. This includes:
- Improved search with highlighting
- Edit History
- Flexible viewing options: Inline and split view
- Role Labels
- Quoting
- Reply Reporting and notifications to Instructors
- Full and partial anonymous graded discussions
- Sort options (Newest to Oldest, Oldest to Newest)
- Filtering (All, Unread, Read)
Announcements
While Announcements is also getting a facelift to improve accessibility and provide design consistency, no functionality has been changed.
How to experience the redesign?
Before July 20, 2024, users will need to turn on the Discussions/Announcements Redesign feature flag. If this has been turned off at the account/root level you’ll need to contact your admin to enable it.
After July 20, 2024, the redesign will be enabled for everyone - no migration or further action is needed. All existing discussions and announcements will simply be updated with the new UI and have access to all the new functionality.
We value your continued feedback and are looking forward to taking this next step. More information can be found in the Product Blog and the Feature Group Knowledge Base.
Best, Sam
