Discussion Redesign Updates

[SamGarza1]

For the past many weeks and months, my team and I have been seeking customer feedback for our ongoing redesign work for Discussion and Announcements. We have been on numerous calls with customers, engaged with users in the Canvas Community, had a usability study shared with us from the University of Minnesota (more on that at InstructureCon), and had ongoing conversations with early adopters. We have listened to that extensive feedback, and I am pleased to present the result of that exercise:

The first item we tackled and have delivered is the ability to see the unread counts to groups. We deployed this item on April 10th, and we have had positive feedback on that addition. If you have had any experience with this feature you feel is worth sharing, please add comments below. 

Group drop down showing three group discussions each with their own unread count.

The next round of features that we’re working on is the ability to mark Discussions as read with One Click, and also to add a setting that disallows threaded replies.

GIF showing the read/unread indicator being marked and unmarked.

We're considering changing which date we sort on and want to get user input on this. Currently, it's the last date in the thread. Would users prefer the original behavior date of the original post? Let us know your preference and feedback on this idea. 

Any and all comments below are welcome!

[ali_lee]

Has there been any changes at all for discussions? My instructors still really dislike the changes, especially not allowing buttons like sort to stay the way they choose without having to repeated click the button again and again.

People have been suggesting fixes for months with no visible changes. 

[ffeldon]

It is totally awful that faculty cannot set Discussions to EXPAND BY DEFAULT, and to be ordered OLDEST FIRST BY DEFAULT. This is critical, I feel, for for standards and effective asynchronous discussion. I also have not read anywhere a Canvas response acknowledging instructor dissatisfaction in this regard, and any plans to address it, anywhere.  --  Fred