Pros and Cons of the Canvas Discussion Redesign
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Hi Instructure folks.
The Discussion redesign has some good points to it, such as mentions, quoting, and reporting. Those are contemporary features that people can enjoy in an online course discussion.
However it looks like threading is limited to just three levels before the nesting stops and replies are stacked in chronological order.
This is disorienting for users because people aren't used to their forums changing modalities based on thread depth. It's kind of like Reddit until it reaches three levels and then it becomes YouTube comments.
Additionally the sidebar truncates after 4 replies, and you cannot expand threads within those to see what your students said in response to a post. That makes it easy to miss comments, or lead to frustration, or fatigue in trying to explore the interface.
Training is required to enable people to use this. It's not "intuitive"; not easy to understand off the bat. Especially with the way the model changes literally mid conversation. People are used to social media for talking online, where the user experience is consistent no matter how long the conversation has been going on for.
It would be awesome if the threading was maintained from the classic discussions, while incorporating some of those more modern features like mentions, quoting, and reporting that have definitely already added value.
Question: Does Instructure plan to bring threading beyond three levels back?
