Student Journal or Blog Feature

[anthonem]

In the past, I designed courses that allowed individual students to keep their own blogs as a journal/log assignment. Is there a way to include a blog feature for individual students (like a journal assignment). This could be set to allow only instructors to see the students' individual blogs OR allow all students to see the blogs but each student can only edit their own. I thought of using "pages" but those can only be made editable by all students or none. Perhaps a slight modification to allow teachers to select individual students to enable editing would suffice.

Ideally, this feature would also allow for multi-part assignments, where the student is graded at certain "checkpoints" as they compose and edit portions of a cumulative assignment.

Originally posted by Robert Anderson: Student Journal or Blog Feature : Help Center

  Response from Instructure

October 2016 update from Chris Ward
There are a lot of blogging solutions out there that have excellent solutions in this space. Because of this, we'll be archiving this feature idea. Thanks for voting and participating in the community!

[troxelsh]

Journals can be easily created using the Assignments tool... but blog assignments can't. The point of blogs is that students can access each others' work to learn from each other. As well as comment on each other's work. Blackboard had an excellent blog tool... I can't imagine that it will be difficult to create this interactive learning tool in Canvas. This is such a bummer that you won't be addressing this for at least a year.

[Renee_Carney]

  Idea is currently in Product Radar Learn more about this stage...

[PSU_Tony]

In my composition course, I sometimes enable the ability for students to create pages and use them for blogging. One of the downsides is students cannot leave comments on a page. I would then use the discussion forum to do that. Another way I sometimes do this is with one of the free blogging tools out their like weebly. I then just make the submission type url.

[cward]

There are a lot of blogging solutions out there that have excellent solutions in this space. Because of this, we'll be archiving this feature idea. Thanks for voting and participating in the community!

[anthonem]

Thanks for the update, Deactivated user​

There are many blogging tools out in the wild, and some can be password-protected so they serve as a journal. Really the underlying assessment piece I included in this request is more valuable:

Ideally, this feature would also allow for multi-part assignments, where the student is graded at certain "checkpoints" as they compose and edit portions of a cumulative assignment.

This is similar to the feature request. Looks like this other request isn't out of scope yet, so there's still hope!

[tom_gibbons]

I make a journal assignment group and then make multiple journal assignments--weekly. Just assign the journal discussions to the group set that has the individual students in their own groups. This allows you to set staged due dates, as well. And no confusion about whether or not the assignment is complete--only the complete assignments are complete.

[jurgen_borstler]

Hi All,

We are now transitioning to Canvas and need a simple feature for students to keep diaries, loggbooks or journals where they regularly add entries without the immediate need for further interaction from the teacher side. Individual entries aren't graded, but can be commented on.

The teacher can check for entries (and comment on them) when he or she wants (or at scheduled "follow-up" times).

This is very useful for project or thesis courses, where students are supposed to work independently, but track their progress on a regular basis. It is therefore important that entries are time-stamped, so that the diaries cannot be "faked" by providing a long list of entries at the end of the course.

What is needed is pretty simple: (1) Students submit time-stamped entries at regular intervals; (2) Teachers can comment, but there is no need to do so regularly, which also implies that individual entries need not be graded; (3) This can be set-up once for all studnets at course start.

Some of the work-arounds suggested so far might work, but seem far too complex to achieve such a simple thing.

Any suggestions are highly appreciated.

[tom_gibbons]

Hi  @jurgen_borstler --

Some of the solutions aren't really that complex. The solution of assigning each student to their own group and then making a discussion board assignment that's a group assignment assigned to that Group Set is really only a few clicks. It takes longer if you want to rename all of the groups so that they're easily identified. And if you have more that 200 students in a course, you won't be able to do assign students to groups automatically through the user interface. You can make some of these tasks possible through the API. 

Here's a video from a few years ago about how to execute the one student-one group strategy (and a lot of it is about *why* you might do this, which is why it's so long). 

Canvas Tip of the Week: Journals - YouTube  

[vrs07nl]

Hi Jurgen 

we have two solutions for now here at Henley Business School  - especially for the UK Degree Apprenticeship Scheme End Point Assessment support we provide

(we would like a proper journal ling tool integrated into Canvas so can create a template and push out to all users once) 

a) Create groups

• with one student per group (you can do this using SIS so that the group set is created and each group names by the student 
• link group set to 'assessed' discussion so get 1-2-1 discussion posts between student and tutor - can then also share docs with tutor in group files area
• cannot easily extract as a takeaway resource

b) use Campus Pack blog

• much easier to create a template blog ( with all necessary instructions and how tos in instruction page) and push out as one per person 
• easy to extract as a standalone takeaway resource
• would have to use Campus pack wiki if want it to be more like an eportfolio - we do not 

We are trying to move away from Campus Pack as  :smileyinfo: campus pack does not recognise Canvas Groups so extra admin work to populate group membership; and :smileyinfo: additional  support resources needed to support mac/ apple users 

Nicola

[lshulman]

I too want to create a running journal for students to make multiple entries over the course of a semester. If it is done using a discussion, how can you make it private (so students cannot see each others posts)? And how can you make it so that the grade is cumulative (added to with each additional entry) rather than having multiple discussions (one for each prompt)?

[vrs07nl]

 @lshulman ‌

as mentioned in the thread above yours - you need to 

a) create a group set  

b) put each student in own group in that set 

c) create a discussion board that's a group assignment assigned to that Group Set