Still More... Discussion Redesign Feedback

[Just-Facts]

We recently asked our teams of instructional designers, technology support, and instructor mentors to review the discussion redesign. Listed below is some of the feedback received. Each row is a person's response.

I dislike that I have to click into everyone's individual post to see their reply.

I do not like that you have to open the replies separately.  I also would be curious to see how this would look in speed grader, or what the ease for the instructor would be. The mentions may be the only positive I am seeing here, but I don't think it would make instructors' lives easier.

Let me count the ways I hate this new format. Nothing is intuitive, and you can't see the flow of the conversation. If you want to reply to an initial post, you have to reply blind, not knowing what anyone before you has said. As demonstrated by the sample threads, this just results in a bunch of people saying the exact same thing and no complex discussion is possible. It's also extremely annoying to have to toggle around in and out of reply threads just to attempt to follow a discussion. I suspect that if I used this is my course it would kill any kind of productive discussion. I can also imagine situations in which students might feel a lot of anxiety around posting in the reply threads without being able to see what others had already said. Final thoughts: I hate this. Please don't make me teach with it.

It is very confusing with the sidebar grouped replies.

I did not like having to select reply and then within the peer's thread having to select quote to reply to another person within the thread. The side view of the thread seems to condense and make me have to scroll even longer. Maybe if I was immersed in the experience for a longer period of time it would grow on me. For the 10-15 minutes I played around with it, I am not a fan.

There are many usability issues with this new format. The extra clicks to view replies - The fact that if you do a "Control + F" to find text for a reply, nothing comes up b/c the replies are not searchable from the main discussion post. As a student and as a teaching assistant, I relied on the "Control + F" search feature to find certain posts or certain student's posts. This could also be an accessibility issue. - The inability to reply to a reply. - I tried to 'quote' a reply and while I did not get any errors, my post never showed up.  --- I hope this helps. Thanks!

It is a nice and easy to understand interface. One issue I ran into when quoting was that after I submitted my entry, I did not see it on the page right away like I did with a regular post / reply. I had to refresh my page in order to see it. Not sure if that is working as intended, but wanted to share my experience with that feature.

I don't like the way the replies to a reply pop up at the side and don't like that you can quote those replies, but not the original reply they're replies to. I do like the way images embed. I'm neutral to the way you reply to the original post.

I do like the visual ease of the sidebar for following the branch discussion. However, I worry about entries getting overlooked once they are "invisible" in the original thread post. And I mean this more for the student than the instructor. I think students may miss content that is relevant.

I think Instructure made this decision because it closely resembles the Slack user interface and they primarily use Slack for internal communication. As an organization that doesn't use Slack at all, we are more used to the traditional discussion user interface, and the Microsoft Teams user interface. I think that this change discourages conversations unless the response has value. This can be both a good thing and a bad thing, but I think it will mostly be bad.

I like that the replies open up in a sidebar. It keeps the page from being so long and having to scroll through all of the replies. The image also embeds nicely.

Like: Role labels, Mentions, Users must post before seeing replies Dislike: You can't reply to a reply. Wish it stayed in the main page instead of a pop up on the side.

[LarryHodges]

Your new quiz format seems to be more limited and inferior to your classic quiz format! Why are you doing this disservice to your customer base? 

[lshulman]

Larry, your comment about new Quizzes does not seem to relate to the Discussion Redesign forum.

I am sure there is a separate discussion or forum related to New Quizzes. 

[JoeGorman]

I have been using Canvas at my institution for somewhere around 8 years.  I have always loved Canvas until they changed the discussion board from a threaded to a nested view.  Like others, I detest having to click on each original post and then drill down to the original comment and the replies to the comments.  Students and professors don't like this.  This change cuts down on class interaction and interferes with the very thing Discussion Boards are there to promote--discussion!

I could go on, but I surely hope that this is not a permanent change.  As a pedagogical tool, this change has a hugly negative effect on the learning environment.

Disappointed and frustrated in Boise, Idaho

[Nancy_Webb_CCSF]

One other issue about needing to view replies in the sidebar, one post at a time, is making it impossible to use print to PDF to save all the discussion's posts.  We miss the expand all option. A better designed expand/collapse replies right in the page would make us more ready to move to the redesign, and perhaps then the auto-save feature would work.