I’m excited to introduce myself to the Canvas Community! My name is Jewel Pearson and I’m a new Product Manager at Instructure, working on Discussions within the Canvas LMS.  I’m excited about this new opportunity to be part of the effort in continually enhancing the world’s fastest growing learning management system and in supporting teachers and students in their online learning and teaching experience! Discussions plays an integral part in the success of the teacher/student connection and interaction and I am committed to listening and creating new features and improvements that make the learning experience even better. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be getting to know how people like you are using Discussions through reading Community posts, talking with CSMs, and digging into feedback some of you have shared. I look forward to hearing from and working with you as we continue to improve Discussions. Please check back here in the Community for exciting updates on what we’ll be releasing in the coming months.  If you are using the anonymity feature in Discussions and/or have opinions about it and would like to share your experience, provide feedback or discuss needed functionality, click this link and sign up for a time to have a brief chat with me and a couple of team members.  I look forward to speaking with you! Also, feel free to add a comment below. Thank you for your interest Canvas, in Discussions and your dedication to your students!    About Me I have worked in the financial services industry as a project and product manager for over 15 years and recently decided I wanted an opportunity to work in an environment that allowed me to feel as if I was making a difference. There were so many value statements that stood out to me as I researched the product manager role here at Instructure, but there was one that made me know this role was for me, which was: “A Canvas Product Manager cares deeply about people”. That statement is me and who I strive to be in a nutshell and I am happy to now be working within an organization where that is important and matters. In my personal life, I’m the mother of one adult daughter who is a lawyer and graduated summa cum laude from North Carolina Central University (Eagle Pride!) and is also a Harvard Law graduate - her success and education were my priority and passion. I also have a thing for tiny houses on wheels (THOWs) and am a tiny house dweller and advocate, having designed and built mine in 2015 (before they were a thing and people just thought I was weird :)). I believe that THOWs offer an opportunity to challenge the housing status quo and offer opportunities for impacting prevalent and longstanding housing inequity and like my professional role here at Instructure, I want to be part of something good that offers the opportunity to make a difference.   ... View more

Hello Community! We have many improvements lined up for our Discussions feature in Canvas. We are taking an iterative approach to delivering value to you as soon as possible so you will see improvements released in stages. Please look out for release timing on our Roadmap page.   ... View more

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! ... View more

I've seen a post or two highlighting the difficulty of seeing student responses in discussion board threads. This is problematic and seems like a missed opportunity to encourage interaction-oriented pedagogy in the LMS. These threads are where we are most likely to find the "human element" that is so essential for creating communities of inquiry in virtual learning environments. So anyway, here's a random and unsolicited idea that might help increase the visibility of threads with high and low engagement: Color code them with a simple spectrum from red to blue. Make threads with high engagement appear  "warm" and threads with low engagement appear "cold". This would not only make thread engagement more visible for course instructors, it might also serve as a helpful prompt for students. Instructors would be able to instruct students to direct their feedback to blue posts, so that everyone gets to experience peer feedback and interaction.  You could leave this as simply an off/on setting. Or you could allow instructors to adjust the thresholds themselves as an advanced setting. You would also need to pair it with some other indicator to ensure accessibility, but that shouldn't be difficult. Probably a dumb idea, but figured I would throw it out there. Anyone else have thoughts about how to increase thread engagement visibility? ... View more

I had chance to take a deeper look at the discussion redesign and I have some questions and feedback.  Reporting - The report button appears in teacher view. If a teacher reports a post, does it go to the admin? If so, where in the admin can I see it? If this doesn't go to the admin, this option in teacher view may be confusing to instructors. Additionally, when the report option is selected in the options menu there is poor contrast between text and background color. See attachment below.  Sidebar hell - I noticed that many instructors who have tried using discussion redesign and have posted feedback here are not happy with sidebar view of replies. I believe that our instructors would feel the same way. There has be a better way to display replies than popping them out on sidebar. This really breaks the flow and can be confusing in a discussion topic that has many replies. Also, please NOT get rid of the open/collapse thread option. This is extremely useful for teachers and students. Our instructors have been asking for a subject link option for a very long time. It would make more sense to have an option and close a thread with the subject line text as the open and close link. Another option they have asked for is the nested discussion topics as well.  Subject Lines for Discussions Teacher-created Discussion threads or sub-topics Description Display - I really don't like that the grading information is displayed in small text that can be easily missed by students. Please make this information more prominent above the description. Also the Publish and edit options are much smaller and will also be easily missed by instructors.  Reply language - I have stated this before but I have never liked that the word "reply" is used for both first post (or new thread) and replies to a thread. This has always been confusing to instructors and students. I do like that the first post reply displays as button. This does help to make the distinction between creating a new post/thread as opposed to replying to a thread. Please use a different word for first post/new thread.  Quote language and function - I don't like that quote language is used by default when responding to a a message in a thread. This will be confusing for all users. Also, there will be times where the user doesn't want to quote the entire post. Allow users to select only the portion they wish to quote. It seems like separate quote option that is placed by reply option would be better.  Anonymous Discussions - In instructor view it is noted above an anonymous discussion description that the instructor's profile will be visible in student view. However, if an instructor creates a reply, the profile will display anonymous in instructor view. I fear this will confuse instructors and they won't read the alert above the discussion description.  Student Created Discussion topics/Discussion index options - When we first adopted Canvas, this caused mass confusion for many instructors. At the time instructors could not turn this option off because the options hadn't been added yet. This is still an issue for those instructors  who do wish to allow students to create discussion topics. This will especially be true with the new anonymous option. If the option to allow students to create discussion topics is on, students often get confused where they should post their reply. This can be really hard for an instructor who is requiring student to post in a graded discussion. Students will often come to the discussion page and click +discussion option at the top of the page to create a reply for the graded discussion. The student is confused and the instructor will be as well because the reply will not be in the graded discussion topic. This leads back to the confusing reply language used.  Personal Discussion Options Issues - The personal setting, Manually mark replies as read, is not available in user account profile settings. I would prefer that it is available to user there as well as the discussion index page. That way if instructors choose to not display the discussion page to students, they would still be able to choose to change the personal setting.  Allow student to edit and delete replies option - I have never liked that instructors can't split these options up. These options should be split apart and set at the individual topic level rather than for all discussions or at least instructors could make a change to this setting for an individual discussion topic.  ... View more