Not happy with Discussion Redesign!

[LizHaskell]

I am struggling with being unable to respond to students' responses to other students! All I find is the word QUOTE at the bottom of the response. Threading is not easily seen. Even my students are not happy! I am trying to find ways to make this work, but not happy!

[lshulman]

I totally agree with you. And there are other comments about this (and other issues of the redesign) making some of the same complaints. See 

Feedback on new reply sidebar 

In fact, I think I recently saw a note from the Canvas staff that responded to all these complaints about the "side bar" for replies that they are going back to something more akin to the "expanded" view to access replies. At least I hope so.

if you go into your course settings and select "features" you should be able to "disable" this new discussion redesign and return to using the old format.

[kgerig]

I agree. We have not received favorable responses from our students. 

The discussion thread is all one long thread now. The ability to collapse and expand is no longer available. 

[bdwilliams03]

I don't seem to be able to start a new post, so I'll reply here. I'd love some updates on where Instructure is in terms of the timeline for the redesign. I have some concerns before making my instructors use this new format. I have seen mention on various threads about looking at threading vs. the sidebar. I would love an update on that. The sidebar really does feel hard to use when looking at replies to replies and getting deep into a discussion.

Do we have a hard timeline on when this will go from beta to the default? Are we going to be losing the ability to choose the legacy discussions anytime soon?

[nuwjg869]

How long has it been since the change to the redesign? Initial psychological reactance may not be favorable, but is it possible in the long run that the redesign will be better? What are the ages of these "unhappy" student populations? What are you doing to facilitate the change in the discussion board style? Are you letting your psychological reactance, your functional change biases get in the way of the adoption for you and your institution. 

Change is hard, but it's also a constant. Give change a chance. 😉

[lshulman]

True, it often does take time to get used  to changes and even come to appreciate them. However, this is such a drastic change and several combined together that is making the problem of acceptance worse. It's not just students either. Most of the negative response in this  forum seems to be coming from faculty  and staff users.

I have turned it off in my courses but it is still being used in our administration/IT help site. So I have continued to have to use it there. Though perhaps not often enough to get used to it. 

I think if they just get rid of the side bar and go back to "collapse/expand" posts, that would help a lot to adjust to other (smaller) changes.

When change comes incrementally it is easier to handle. In the past, A lot of Canvas changes have been welcome and even small enough to not be noticed with not so much complaining. That this one has generated so much negative discussion should suggest it's not just a psychological problem with accepting change.

[Jeff_F]

@nuwjg869  -  I gave the new design five weeks of effort. In fact, at the end of each week I was tempted to disable it for all the various reasons previously stated  however opted to keep it on hoping for an 'aha' moment that never came.  Changes such as the limit of a single reply level that are perceived as limiting our ability to effectively and efficiently communicate with students will not be well received. 

[andrew_sheppard]

Respectfully, one should not blame users when an upgraded interface is not intuitive (and creates more confusion than the original version.) Online discussion forums have been around for 20+ years. We shouldn't lower our expectations or expect instructors to re-educate students on what should be an easy and intuitive exchange of ideas.  (Edited to fix typo.)

[mwolfenstein]

Change is not universally good, and in this case we have virtually every community member reacting negatively to the primary change in presentation not because it's different, but because it's a genuinely bad user experience. The slide out tray arguably violates heuristics 2, 4, 6, 7, and 8 of the Nielsen Norman group's widely accepted 10 usability design heuristics. That's half of the heuristics that UX designers employ to make sure that interface design is likely to be good before you test it, let alone role it out for general availability. The tray design is not a good case for giving change a chance. There are plenty of other aspects of  the redesign that are, but this one is just bad design that doesn't fit user expectations or needs.

[AllisonPittler]

Thank you for your comments, everyone! We hear you, and we are striving to make well-informed decisions to better meet your needs. I would love to hear about specific workflow examples – For instance, what about the redesign impacts your use of Discussions and in what way? Where are students struggling with the redesign? It would be fantastic if any interested faculty could reach out to our lovely CSMs to schedule some time to chat with us! It'd be great to talk with faculty and/or students to dig deeper into what we can do to make the Discussions redesign the best it can be. 

[kgerig]

I am available for a chat time. I reside in MST. 

I work in Canvas every day as an administrator managing 15 courses. I am also the point of contact for students who have any questions with Canvas. I can review their end-of-course surveys. 

Additionally, I use Canvas as a student for another institution. They are still using the old version. 

So, I am familiar with Canvas as an administrator and as a student. 

[rkilgore1]

Students cannot see all the replies in a single scrolling/scanning experience up and down.  As most of us require reply postings, they complain about having to click on each person to see the posting.  You have essentially taken the left 2/3 of the screen and made it a roster of who has posted rather than showing us the content they posted.

Oh, and when we do click reply in the sidebar, we can no longer see the previous replies which makes it more difficult to create a quality reply.   

And a student also pointed out that we can no longer use Ctrl-F to search down the entire set of postings and replies for content.  She also said that students that posted richer content with pictures and videos will likely no longer do since likely only the original poster will see it instead of the entire class.

Return to the threaded replies.

[lshulman]

All valid and excellent points. I agree.

Hoping I never HAVE to use this Redesign (for the time being I am still able to "disable" it in my course sites).

[Jeff_F]

@AllisonPittler @SuSorensen  - Hello! It was nice meeting with the team earlier this month to discuss the redesign.  At the time I shared a few numbers about students in courses I teach which provided a little transparency about their patterns of replying.  I wish to add to that here.

We have ten terms a year and in our JAN 2022 term we had 10,576 students enrolled in 831 Canvas courses using the discussion tool. See below for a table that indicates the number of replies at each depth for all courses during that term. In sharing this I hope to draw attention to the volume of interactions that occur in depths 3 and greater.  Granted, there aren't that many at depths ten or thirty-two, but they do exist. In all, there were 61,791 replies at a depth of 3 or greater for this one term.

Because of this my contention is that removal of the ability to reply beyond the initial reply and the removal of the ability to view the depths of the replies will inhibit conversations. As that is the point of a discussion board, i.e. to engage with students, I find it necessary to reassert this development is flawed and will not be well received.

When we met, the Instructure meeting coordinator Jeffrey Johnson asked about how students received the tool. I was willing to evaluate the tool in my course for five weeks but eventually disabled it as using it was quite laborious as I had to click to view the content of the replies, to close those replies, and click again to see the next set and so on.  My feedback and some from my students is posted to the various threads here in this community.  For example: from 9-20-2021  and posted on 9-25-2021.   Because of these serious issues I cannot in good conscience recommend that other faculty use the redesign. The risk is simply too great. That said, when I present the opportunity it will come with warnings.

ps. as an aside, I've not read all that many (any?) faculty entries here that are enamored with the redesign. Has anyone written here that they favor this?  If so, change my mind.

Term	# Courses Having Replies at This Depth	Depth	# Replies At Depth
Jan-22	831	1	126,193
	813	2	228,760
	781	3	49,248
	690	4	9,568
	424	5	2,049
	207	6	605
	84	7	183
	36	8	62
	15	9	31
	10	10	15
	5	11	6
	3	12	3
	2	13	2
	1	14	1
		15	1
		16	1
		17	1
		18	1
		19	1
		20	1
		21	1
		22	1
		23	1
		24	1
		25	1
		26	1
		27	1
		28	1
		29	1
		30	1
		31	1
		32	1

[andrew_sheppard]

Jeff, thank you for taking the time to advocate for all of us. This tool needs to be desperately fixed for the benefit of all of our students. 

[cesbrandt]

The reply depth limit is the only reason we haven't already made the transition to the new discussions. It seems so minor, but it's really frustrating from the user standpoint of following a discussion thread. We'd been hoping to see this resolved before enforcement, but with that coming July 20, we're getting concerned that it won't be.

This is what Instructure currently gives:

This is what we'd like to see:

[kgerig]

Can you provide a link or more information about the July 20 new discussion format being implemented? 

[cesbrandt]

It's at the very bottom of the Discussion Redesign Update from 2023-12-01.

---

@SamGarza1 wrote:

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. 

---

Honestly, I didn't even know about it until today when our CSM told us about it. That the thread depth hasn't been addressed is a bit concerning to us given the looming enforcement.

[tajohnson1]

A few initial thoughts: 

1. The constant reshuffling order of posts as they are made makes it difficult to keep track of what is being said and when it said in relation to the replies. 

2. The navigation at the top of the screen vs directly below the discussion prompt requires the reader to lose track of their place as they are navigating through the posts

3. There is no way to pin the instructor's post to the top. The instructor's post initial post, which is designed to teach students some content prior to their replies, is pushed down the discussion as others post. 

4. Our IT team has added boxes around each post to try and add some structure to the flow of the discussion. This does not fix the reordering issue that does not seem to make sense. I would love someone to share the logic behind the reordering of the posts.

[emily_asher]

In all honesty, my favorite discussion format is what Blackboard uses.  There is a list of posts with the author, clicking on the post opens the post and all replies, replies nest, each thread provides a notification of new posts, each post notifies if someone responded to me, and I can use a tree view which shows my interaction with each student.  I have never found myself cursing at it (although I curse at other parts of Blackboard) and have never gotten a student complaint besides getting attachments to work (they need to fix a couple things there).  It's easy for students to find their original posts, easy to respond to the main topic and easy to respond to peers.  There are some functionalities which I would fix, but ability to navigate and keep my conversations organized is tops!  What my students and I need is the ability to see all the main posts in a condensed list, click on a main post and see all the main post with all the responses and not have to do any fancy footwork for them to show up.  Imagine the current Canvas discussions but when they open, all we see is the student's main post.  Then, there is an expand button to open the post and responses so it looks like it does now.  Students and I can open the post, post, close the post and move on to the next thread.  The new Canvas version resembles D2L and their discussion format is clunky and doesn't provide a seamless conversation. 

My dream discussion is like this:

Discussion Prompt

Student name and post name 1 <-- can expand to show all response threads, indicates new post in threads
Student name and post name 2 <-- can expand to show all response threads, indicates new post in threads
Student name and post name 3<--- can expand to show all response threads, indicates new post in threads

No navigating away or having a pop up.  Just click to expand, post and contract, and move on to the next thread.  It would be very basic follows the way Canvas already nests, but with the ability to expand and contract the threads.   

[vanzandt]

What @emily_asher has described, is what I think of when I go to a discussion board tool. A listing of topics, with the ability to easily expand and contract topics to see/hide nested replies.

[lshulman]

Emily Asher,

It is not clear where your discussion of Blackboard stops and your discussion of Canvas begins.

I am guessing that everything you liked was what blackboard did that Canvas does not? And where you start talking about " some functionalities which I would fix, but ability to navigate and keep my conversations organized is tops! " I am not sure if you mean in Blackboard or in Canvas? The discussion of "What my students and I need" seems to be about what Canvas is lacking (that Blackboard had?)

One other thing I liked about Blackboard discussion that Canvas is [STILL] lacking: a subject line for each post!

The old version of Canvas discussions DID have ability to "expand" (down arrow) and "collapse" (up arrow) either all posts in a given discussion or just one post with replies to that one post. Perhaps the default should be the collapsed view where you only see the first line in each top level reply to the discussion.

I do like the old Canvas discussion where a "threaded" view will have each level of reply indented. The teacher has to use discussion "settings" to tell it to "allow threading".

[emily_asher]

Sorry!  Blackboard is great, the new Canvas format is not.  Discussions are a place to discuss, not reply to one person.  I've disabled the new format in Canvas. 

[lshulman]

To add to these observations from @emily_asher...

We need THREADED replies, where each reply to a reply is indented so one can easily track who is talking to whom.

The old Canvas discussions allowed for making the discussion "threaded". I ALWAYS use it that way and can't understand why anyone would prefer it the other way.

The new pop-out window pane for each "thread" merely tacks a new reply to the bottom of the list of replies, no matter to whom in the sub-discussion one is replying to. There does not seem to be any option to truly "thread" the sub-discussions.

[cgl233]

I wholeheartedly agree! I've used Canvas, Blackboard, Blackboard Ultra, Brightspace/Desire2Learn, and Moodle as instructor and student. D2L also has a statistical function for instructors that shows a chart for each student that includes a column for total replies in the forum, how many threads each student authored within that forum, how many posts each student replied to, and how many posts each student read. It's very helpful as an instructor -- especially when we think a student is struggling or disengaging from the course. I would love to see this feature added to the new discussions design.

[GeorgiannaAinsl]

Just found this discussion recently as I have been complaining to our IDT team and was given the link to contribute my feedback.  I am not at all happy with this "upgrade" - or whatever they are calling it, and after using it for the duration of one of my on-line classes, I have disabled it for my other courses.  As others have commented, we no longer have a continuous discussion, albeit with separate threads.  What we have now are 'chat rooms' where students (and faculty) do not see a discussion unless they specifically click into it, which many of them are unlikely to do if they are only required to respond to two or three group-mates.  It was possible, with the long threads, that they still might not read every post, but they were much more likely to do so as they scrolled by.  As the instructor, if I make a response in one thread, with the 'chat room' feature, other students were unlikely to see that response - might have some important information.  This then gives me the option of making an 'announcement' which is completely removed from the discussion at hand, or to post the response to all 37 'chat room' posts!  Since I am sure there are some who actually like this feature, if it continues forward, coming out of beta, I strongly recommend that the ability to disable the feature remains for those of us (and our students) who do not prefer it.

[kgerig]

Very well said! You nailed the description of this design when you said "chat room". I also agree with your suggestion for Canvas to keep this as an option for the institutions if they proceed past the beta stage. 

[mwolfenstein]

@AllisonPittler You've asked for specific examples of where students are struggling with the redesign, but I want to emphasize that at my campus I have told faculty not to turn on the redesign because the UX issues with the slide out tray are so severe that it doesn't take forcing our students and faculty to struggle with it for me to know that they'll hate it, and that it will quite probably negatively impact our outcomes. I can't emphasize this enough. Before I turn anything on in Canvas at El Camino, it is my duty as Distance Education Faculty Coordinator to make sure that it's not likely to make students or faculty struggle, and I have enough UX know how to take one look at that tray and know that it would present a real risk to student success in some courses, not to mention create a huge headache for faculty that will slow down their workflow and diminish the quality of classroom discourse.

The bottom line on the workflow issues with the tray are really straighforward. A discussion in a course is in most cases, implemented to create back and forth communication between and among the students and faculty. There are other possible uses, but that's the big one. Hence, any changes in design need to support the UX patterns that we already know define the positive parts of discussion forum interaction for learning not just in LMS's, but in any other place where a forum style of communication is used and learning takes place. The slide out tray unfortunately violates user expectations and disrupts the patterns that effectively support teaching and learning in an online space.

Say I'm a student being asked to post once and reply twice. I'm not the first student to post and some responses already have replies. With the current UI, I only see top level comments and an indication that there are replies. If this discussion is working the way most faculty want it to work, there might be two or three replies to a post, and then at least one level down from that more responses if the students are motivated and engaged with the topic. As a student, I need to see everyone's responses, and the responses to those responses before I post my own. I need to not have to store that information in my head as I click down into each response and sub response. If I'm forced to do that, I've expended a huge amount of cognitive effort managing that task, and that means  I have less cognitive load for actually framing my response and thinking about the subject matter of the course. It's part of the most fundamental principle of UX for education software: Your interface needs to require the bare minimum of cognitive labor because you need as much cognitive capacity as possible available for learning the subject or topic that the class is about.

Then there's the role of the instructor. If I've had a successful set of interactions between my students, I'm going in to do two things:

1. Reply including possibly providing formative feedback, summing up the conversation, advancing the conversation further, etc.
2. Grade

This UI is terrible for both of those things. I can't see the whole flow of the conversation at once. I can't search the page effectively. I can't tell whether there are common trends going on in my student responses without taking very detailed notes. If I see something that reminds me of a student response to another student, I need to track down the initial post and then click into the responses until I find the post I was thinking of. I can't even tell at a glance if some students are dominating the conversation in a way that's destructive to classroom discourse.

tl;dr The slide out tray completely misses the most fundamental practices that define a useful online discussion forum in a course because it chews up cognitive load in managing the interface taking away from the users capacity as teacher or student to engage in the topic.

[kaplanb]

Threaded discussions are vital for student interactivity.  This feature should not be disabled.

[JDPearson]

Sorry to hear that you and others are unhappy with the Discussion Redesign. We have heard "mixed reviews" of the redesign and are in the process of gathering user feedback and data to assist us with making improvements based on trends/data.

If you'd be interested in sharing your feedback, please feel free to schedule time with me and my team here: https://calendly.com/jewel-pearson/30min

[canvas_admin]

@JDPearson when clicking on that link, the verbiage there makes it sound like it is only to discuss the anonymity feature of New Discussions, rather than overall discord with the re-design. Please clarify. If it's only about anonymity, then i don't need to schedule with you as we do not use that feature. If it's about the overall re-design, then I would love to schedule some time.

[JDPearson]

You are still welcome to schedule and I have re-worded the invite, thanks for your feedback.

[KimberlyTByrd]

Completely agree!  The format is not close to being user friendly.  I respond to 100% of my students and now have to spend so much extra time trying to figure out who I have responded to and who is pending.  In the old format, you could easy discern who you posted to and move along quickly.  The new format is hard to manage and ultimately negatively impacts the student experience.  Please go back to the old format!  ASAP!  Or at least give us the option to view it both ways. 

[NAshcraft]

I also read and respond to all of my students and am having the same issues that you described.   The order of the posts keeps changing (whether you choose "oldest first" or "newest first").  It would facilitate my progression through reading the posts if they were in a fixed order.

[william_simkule]

As I see it, there are 3 big problems with the redesign:

• First, and most problematically, the forums now appear to hide Replies by default.  Canvas now has an [Expand Threads/Collapse Threads] button at the top of the forum, but the default is that they have been "collapsed" so that students cannot read Replies without first expanding on them.  (They can also click the "# Reply" link at the bottom of the page, but this doesn't always expand the replies, and sometimes it expands the replies but they're hidden by the page.)

  The big academic problem with this change is that it hides Replies from students, discouraging them from reading the replies.  This effectively neuters discussion forums as academic tools, as most students will never see their classmates and/or instructors replies.

   

  • Second, the discussion forum Posts appear to display "last post first" rather than "first post first."  There is a button at the top of the page to change this, but - as with the previous problem - it's unlikely that most students will bother to do this.

     

    In my experience confused and/or unmotivated students will use the first post they see in a discussion as a template for their Post (rather than reading assignment instructions), which is why I like to post Sample Discussion posts for the first few weeks of class.  However, because the forum displays posts in "last post first" format, many of these students will never even see the Sample Post and might base their Post off of the last student's post, leading to a substantive decline in quality.  

     

    (I try to make my discussion forums "easy" to get full credit on, but if students aren't reading replies and aren't reading sample posts, I suspect I'm going to be getting a lot of failing grades on what was supposed to be an easy assignment!)

     

    • Third, due to the change in Canvas, there are now two scroll bars to the right; the "page scroll bar" which scrolls up and down slightly, and then a "forum" scroll bar which scrolls down through the Posts and/or Replies.

      This double-scroll bar problem seems to compound the first problem, as clicking a "# reply" link sometimes displays the reply under the visible page, so the student/faculty member might not even see the replies despite clicking on it.  Apart from that, it's just clunky and unintuitive.

       

      This redesign is bad and hobbles Canvas as a learning tool.  Frankly I cannot think of any benefits, but whatever imagined benefits, they're not worth a drastic increase in failing grades.

[cesbrandt]

So, it is hardly perfect, but we recently revisited the redesign in preparation for training faculty on it. In the process, I worked out a border/padding solution that "helps" with keeping track of things.

[data-testid="discussion-root-entry-container"] [data-testid="notHighlighted"] > * > [class*="css-"][class*="-view--flex-flex"]:first-of-type > [class*="css-"][class*="-view-flexItem"]:first-of-type:has([class*="css-"][class*="-view-flexItem"]),
[data-testid="discussions-split-screen-view-content"] [data-testid="notHighlighted"] > [class*="css-"][class*="-view--flex-flex"]:first-of-type > [class*="css-"][class*="-view-flexItem"]:first-of-type:has([class*="css-"][class*="-view-flexItem"]) {
    border: 1px solid #c7cdd1;
    border-radius: .25rem;
    padding-top: .75rem;
}

Now, I know it looks bad...and it is... Here's the upside: it works. What's more, it works in both split-screen and inline.

Will it still work next month when they enforce the redesign and likely restructure the DOM for no reason? Probably not, but it's something.

[Shar]

Hi @cesbrandt !

Your code is a great solution! Especially because it doesn't rely on any crazy specific letters and numbers that I had to do for desktop, tablet, and mobile. I'll probably use this in combination with the CSS I use to distinguish thread replies from initial reply post.

And yeah guess, we will wait and see what happens next month if the selectors change when they release the final version. heh.

Thank-you for looking out for us,
Cheers - Shar ⭐

[cesbrandt]

I tried to make it future proof, so if these IDs change it "should" still work, but it can easily break by changing the DOM tree.

As for mobile, honestly, didn't give it any thought. We long ago accepted the mobile experience would be different from the desktop and don't bother trying to make changes for it. I would imagine they would have similar trees, though.

[Jeff_F]

@cesbrandt - thank you for sharing; we are looking at using the shared CSS. I really like how this makes the font the same size for the replies past the initial post.

I am curious about the image you shared as that is showing indents for reply levels past 3.  Perhaps that was a screen grab from an earlier iteration of the redesign?

[cesbrandt]

Nope, that was from the current Live version of the redesign at the time of my post. I just double-checked with global includes disabled and the threading is indenting (at least to a depth of 10). In the DOM, the left margin is being increased by 3.75rem for each level. It's coded directly on the DOM elements, so I assume it is recursive to any depth (but don't quote me).