Add Discussion Board versioning and/or undelete.

[memrys]

Currently there is no way to recover a previous version of an edited or deleted discussion post. This can be a problem as a student caught in a situation of questionable academic integrity can edit or delete the evidence. For graded discussions this can also create accreditation issues because the grading artifact can be altered.

While the simple answer is 'disallow edits and deletes', these do have value. Double-posts can be cleaned up directly by the student, minor typos can be corrected, and the vast majority of students and faculty benefit from allowing edits.

If discussions had versioning that was available to the faculty, so the multiple versions of a post could be viewed, this would eliminate the downsides of allowing edits while retaining all the benefits.

[lshulman]

I agree that being able to see what someone might have changed (edited) in a post is helpful. Also helpful is this "versioning" idea also allow teachers to see posts that users (or they) might have deleted. The current "eyeball" icon that allows uses to "show deleted replies" does not actually show the content of those deleted replies. Rather pointless to simply show that something WAS deleted and by whom without any idea as to what the content might have been.

Beyond this idea, I think Canvas can go even further in updating discussion settings and notifications when it comes to editing posts. I am posting a couple other ideas related to the edit/delete function for discussions and how Canvas notifies us of such: "Create new notification for edits to discussion replies"

[instructionalt3]

This is a great idea especially since it it is easy for teachers to accidentally delete a student's discussion post.

[chastinec]

This is a much needed improvement!

[HeatherMCash87]

For the purpose for identifying plagiarism, I think it would be a great feature to be able to review edited discussion post on the instructor side of a course. We have had problems with students copying other student post, then change it, or paraphrase it. 

[HeatherMCash87]

We would like to be able to review a student discussion response that was edited. So to have the ability as the Instructor of a course to review all submissions to a discussion including the original and edited submissions for all the students. 

For example, a student copies and pastes a response from someone else, then edits it so that it is paraphrased into his/her own words - other students are complaining but we can not see the original posts from this student just the edited version. We would like to have permission to review items like this. 

Thanks, 

[ProductPanda]

Comments from Instructure

As part of the new Ideas & Themes process, all ideas in Idea Conversations were reviewed by the Product Team. Any Idea that was associated with an identified theme was moved to the new Idea & Themes space. Any Idea that was not part of the move is being marked as Archived. This will preserve the history of the conversations while also letting Community members know that Instructure will not explore the request at this time.