Problem statement:
New Discussions functionality allows Instructor and TA roles to be labeled: Canvas Release: Discussions/Announcements Redesign However, Custom Roles based on Instructor or TA roles are not currently labeled in New Discussions. For example, we have a custom role named Canvas TA that is based on the TA role. A person with the Canvas TA role is not currently identified in New Discussions as a TA/Canvas TA.
Proposed solution:
We would like Role Labels to appear in New Discussions for custom roles that are based on the default Teacher and TA roles. Ideally, the custom role names would appear in the role label instead of the base role e.g., a person with our custom Canvas TA role would have a "Canvas TA" role label.
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We've got some fantastic news to share – we've just finished a brand new video resource that provides an overview of the Discussion Redesign in Canvas!
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I noticed the redesign was put into place on our campus and I noticed a major issue for my classes. Overall, I think the redesign looks great and has positive aspects, but it make it extremely difficult to track my replies.
I try to "spread the discussion love" to all of my students. The thing that has helped me do that is the lists of posts in Date Posted order. That feature seems to be completely wiped out. Additionally, if I try to sort by newest or oldest, it sorts by replies instead of just posts. Further, if a student's post doesn't get any replies, it will stay at the top or the bottom depending upon the sort so they will likely be excluded from the discussion. This seems as if it will cause DEI issues.
Also, the read/unread should be fixed. If I read the post, I should be able to click on the dot to mark it read. I should not have to mark the replies as read before the it shows the post is read.
Leaving everything else the same, is there a way to have posts stay in date submitted order so the most recent reply doesn't push the posts all around the discussion? Also, is there a way to leave the post as read even though there are new replies?
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Over the last two years since this feature group was created, our team has released many updates to the Discussion/Announcement Redesign feature preview. Taking user feedback from this group, the community as a whole, and internally to ensure that what we created didn’t have any loss in functionality but also provided new functionality that our users needed.
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I've had the following questions raise while writing some training materials for Discussions Redesign for our faculty:
Which notification preference controls post report messages?
Why do reported posts not show in the teacher todo? Why are discussions with reported posts not marked on the Discussions page instead of requiring the teacher to check inside each discussion?
When a discussion is created from modules, it is immediately actually created. Many people work "top down" by creating placeholders for everything and then go back to fill in the details later. While this technically matches the behavior of Pages, Assignments, and Quizzes, it introduces broken functionality with Discussions Redesign. Any discussions created from modules will be forced with anonymity off, which cannot be turned on later.
What is the origin of the anonymous avatar? I have two tester accounts that have the same name and they have the same avatar. This is a problem because sometimes students do have the same name (sometimes even in the same course -- it happens often enough in my school, and Instructure's aware of this to have implemented disambiguation measures in a few places). It also seems to be the same across different courses, which could seriously be a de-anonymizer as people are in courses together.
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