[Discussions] See all of a student's posts together

In order to assess and grade a student on participation in the discussion boards, it would be helpful to be able to see all of that student's posts aggregated on a single page.

  • Of course the replies will be out of context, but that would still be helpful, especially if there were a "see in context" button on each response by the student.
  • It would be helpful if each post came with the basic metadata, including the subject of the thread in which it was embedded if it's a response
  • As an option, perhaps one could filter these to see only the top level posts by any particular student. 
60 Comments
KristinL
Community Team
Community Team

Hi! I hope you are able to share these wonderful insights in the other thread. You have great use cases, and I think others would benefit from hearing them!

I'm going to Archive this thread and link it with the one above.

franz_metcalf
Community Member

I'm posting now to see if this thread is still alive (after the two thread merger) and to note that multiple other instructors have requested the discussion review feature—and at least one has despaired that it will ever be implemented. This cannot be a difficult feature to add. I simply do not understand why it would have been missing in the first place, let alone after years of requests.

Franz

rdutta
Community Participant

Like Franz, I too want to know. We requested these and there are multiple forums for the same idea, but no action yet! Students develop over the semester! I grade them for their growth. If I can't see each student's responses over the discussions, it is difficult to assess that growth. It is a simple idea of being able to view discussions per student (and being able to pick which ones you want to see - I understand some want to see all discussions for all students, others like me want to be able to see all discussions (from which we can pick and choose) for the one student (not the whole class matrix). It could just be part of analytics! We can see grades, why can't we see all the discussion posts one after another? Currently, I can click on them as assignments but then cannot move from one to the other. I have to hit the back button that takes me back to the people tab!! This is not such a difficult thing to do. We would greatly appreciate some action, or knowing if some action is on the way!

Ranjana

bbuescher
Community Member

At Pierce College at JBLM, we switched from Blackborad to Canvas in early 2012. At that point I contacted my local Canvas expert about the inability to see a student's full discussion participation easily. I think I wrote my first ticket in 2015. I have done a couple since then and had numerous colleagues join me in advocating for this tool. Our current Canvas admin person assures me that Canvas will act if they get enough pressure--I am not convinced. 

The ability to view a student's discussion participation  has been a standard feature in the other platforms I have used. Even though I participate heavily in each discussion stream, not having the tool costs me many hours each term as I must go back and remember the quantity, quality, and timelessness of each student's discussion participation. 

ProfPTJ
Community Member

Count me in as another instructor who would really like to see a simple solution to this problem implemented -- some way to click from a student's name to all of their posts in a given course.

franz_metcalf
Community Member

Hi All,

Just a quick reminder: my campus educational technology office is able to create a spreadsheet from the Canvas discussion data, if I ask them. This spreadsheet shows all posts by all students and I can arrange the data as I wish (e.g., student by student or discussion by discussion). The only deficiencies are that the posts are undated and, of course, the fact that I have to ask my overworked local folks to do this for every single class. Still, I'm going to keep asking them until Canvas implements this feature. They told me that they created a script for the process and now it only takes them a few minutes, so I don't feel so bad. I would encourage you all to make the same request at your own campuses. Maybe the ET folks will get sick of us and start asking for the feature as well! That might put the request over the top and get some action from Canvas.

ProfPTJ
Community Member

@franz_metcalf That's an excellent idea and I will make that request on my own campus.

MichaelBoezi
Community Member

This would be SOOOO helpful at the end-of-term getting a qualitative sense of a student's contributions.

KristinL
Community Team
Community Team
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KristinL
Community Team
Community Team
Status changed to: Added to Theme