I now HATE Canvas!

[lshulman]

This new discussion redesign was thrown at us literally overnight with no advance notice.

I HATE it!

At least we are able to "disable" the feature and continue using the old discussion format.

However, I now hear that come January 2022, we will no longer have that option. There are so many things wrong with this new structure, I cannot begin to list them all. But at least Canvas should give us more time to get used to this and allow us to choose when or if to "enable" it in our own courses. 

I am tempted to completely eliminate all discussion in my courses if I cannot continue to use the old format.

[nwilson7]

@lshulman For what it is worth, you may want to reach out to whoever is your Canvas Administrator for your school/institution.  The new design is still in beta and was not a forced push out by Canvas.  If it is turned on at your institution, your Canvas Administrator would have done that.  I am the lead Canvas Administrator at my institution and since it is still in beta, I have NOT turned it on for my faculty. 

-Nick

[lshulman]

nwilson7

<I am the lead Canvas Administrator at my institution and since it is still in beta, I have NOT turned it on for my faculty. >

Speaking from the perspective of faculty who was blind sided when my institution did turn it on, I suggest you let your faculty know of the upcoming change. Allow them to "experiment" with it if they are so inclined (allow them to enable it if they want to try it). Prepare or provide information on the changes, even provide training for those who want to try it. Let them get used to it and join his discussion with feedback on what they like and don't like about it. 

Do not keep them in the dark about what might be coming, like it or not.

[nwilson7]

@lshulman This is great advise and I agree 100%.  We try to run things in parallel and with lots of communication so currently faculty can test the new design out if they want but we try not to force a change until we have had plenty of time to train and communicate.  The majority of the Canvas admin, including myself, are also faculty (adjuncts) so we are directly impacted by the changes we make which I think helps keep things in perspective.  

Good luck with your semester!

-Nick

[Katrina-Hess]

@lshulman, @nwilson7 is correct you can simply disable the Feature Preview in your Course Settings. The Discussions/Announcements redesign is in a beta state and under active development. If you are not interested in testing the updates, you can continue using the current version. I'm not sure where you're hearing any dates around deprecation of the current version. We will survey this user group before deprecating anything.

[Katrina-Hess]

@lshulman the Feature Preview flag is set to Unlocked and Disabled on our side which means you (or a root account admin) would have to Enable it or set it to a Locked state. Please submit a support ticket so we can investigate why you are unable to disable it. 

[lshulman]

You must have misunderstood my original post here. I noted that I WAS able to disable it (and quite glad to be able to do that).

I am just hoping the option to disable this continues beyond the end of this year (as I was informed by my Canvas admin that come January we would no longer be able to disable it). But, at the current time, yes, I see where I can and did disable it.

[Jeff_F]

@lshulman - 

My wager is the Canvas admin made a mistake. Chances are the feature was set to Enabled and Unlocked.  As this is in beta, we set it as Disabled and Unlocked so instructors can elect to opt in.

Can you please provide some detail as to why you have such a regard for this proposed redesign format?  Details are needed here.  Why is it liked or to the contrary, disliked?

[lshulman]

<Can you please provide some detail as to why you have such a regard for this proposed redesign format?  Details are needed here.  Why is it liked or to the contrary, disliked?>

Jeff, I gave some specific reasons elsewhere in this forum. But my major concern is the way the Discussion Redesign organizes the posts in terms of "oldest" or "newest" first. I do prefer posts to be ordered from oldest first. But the way Canvas now determines this order is based on the date/time of the REPLIES rather than the "parent" post. The way I use discussions with my students also requires that students be aware of what has been posted before they post. I do not want students posting duplicate questions or repeating what others have said. Thus they need to be able to see what was posted previously (both in terms of parent as well as reply posts). If the ordering of posts is going to vary each time a user views a discussion, based on which parent post has newer replies, that is going to cause a LOT of confusion for both myself and my students.

I also find the "thread tray" awkward to use and, ultimately, should be unnecessary when the old method of "collapse/expand replies" serves the same purpose in a simpler way. As well, being able to view ALL posts "expanded" on a single page makes it easier to use the browser "find" function to locate posts from a specific user and keep those in context with other posts in the discussion. (I have seen someone else mention this as an issue of concern).

The method of marking a post or thread as "read" or "unread" is also not as simple as it was in the old format. As I have seen others mention, that now requires two clicks (open the menu and then click a selection) vs. simply clicking to toggle the green dot on or off. 

Then there is the new "quote" option for replies. While being able to quote a specific section of a post we are replying to is actually quite helpful, this is not helpful if the "quote" button copies the ENTIRE post (especially if it is a lengthy post) we are replying to. Rather, we should be able to select specific lines we are responding to (or edit out what we are not responding to). In the old format, I would simply copy and paste between <brackets> text from the post I was replying to (as I have done with your comment above). So not even having a "quote" button is not really a problem. 

[Jeff_F]

@lshulman  - thanks for posting these perceptions.  My goal in asking is two-fold.  I want to cross reference your feedback with mine and of course the development team would want to see the pain points.

I too had challenges as the discussion sort order was ever changing as it was based on any post in the board, not just the parent post. So what is the fix?  Perhaps let the user choose how they wish the board to sort.   And there have been proposed filters which will help as well.  For example, a filter that limits the view to only parent posts you have not replied to. I'd buy that for a dollar.  ;o)

[Katrina-Hess]

@lshulman As I've mentioned, we will survey the user group before considering deprecation. 

[barbara_filkins]

I completely agree with you. Canvas needs to listen up on this one. We are getting focused discussions defacto -- not a useful educational and instructional tool by having only one level of response.

[erinhmcmillan]

Hi @barbara_filkins 

I noticed you have posted an Idea Conversation related to this topic—thank you! By doing so you are participating in our product team's direct of hearing your feedback. Please see responses added to your reply in  Threaded Discussions.

Thank you,

Erin

[erinhmcmillan]

Hi @lshulman 

Thanks for joining this users group! As others have also noted, we are sorry that your Canvas admin has turned on this feature without advanced notice. Admins are allowed to decide when they want to turn on a feature for their institution, so any dates provided to you would be through your admin and not by Canvas.

The purpose of this user group is to get your feedback and use cases that will help improve the feature being developed—as this feature still is and is subject to change. Our product team realizes not everyone will like updates made to features, and this group gives you an opportunity to share what is working for you and what could be considered to be a possible adjustment. Focusing on your discussions workflow in the classroom is especially helpful to our product team.

We appreciate your comments while adhering to our Community guidelines, specifically to be cool; our product manager is extremely attentive (and is a real person) and thanks you for conveying constructive dialog.

Thank you,

Erin

[mwolfenstein]

I have to admit that I'm surprised by the strength of this negative response. I'm personally really not a fan of the side bar rather than vertical format that the redesign has implemented, and I really hope that the redesign team takes into account that I'm definitely not the only one with this perspective. It's completely counter to UX conventions for online communication tools (e.g Facebook, Quora, Twitter, Reddit, Discord, and every discussion forum software I've ever seen) which are vertical.

However, there's are a lot of major quality of life improvements in the beta and there are plans for a lot of other ones that will also lead to a much more modern discussion forum tool. I'm also a little surprised at the idea that this is a blindside since the redesign was announced at InstructureCon 2019, the beta was announced in the update emails, and it's a beta feature that has to be explicitly turned on as optional or default be local admins. To be clear, I think there are some major issues in the redesign that need to be worked out, but if you look at the history of Ideas here on the community site you'll see that the most of the features being implemented (with the obvious exception of the sidebar format) have been requested for a very long time, and that the majority of them are modernizing discussions to have comparable features to other online forum platforms.

[44008519]

I agree. It was hard enough to get them to read one another's posts and my responses before and now they have to click on replies to even see where the professor has engaged the conversation. It has absolutely ruined what little interaction there was in discussion threads.