Wrapping Up Discussions Redesign: Checkpoints Come to Group Work

[SamGarza1]

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What’s Changing?

Earlier this year we launched Discussion Checkpoints, a feature designed to encourage structured participation by setting deadlines for each reply of a discussion. This enhancement aimed to promote more thoughtful, intentional engagement among students. Until now, Discussion Checkpoints have been available exclusively for individual discussions. We’re excited to share that as of June 18, instructors can now enable Discussion Checkpoints for group discussions as well!

Image of Discussion settings highlighting “assign graded checkpoints” and “this is a group discussion”.

What to expect?

Discussion checkpoints for group discussions mirrors the functionality found in standard discussions. Educators can now set a required number of replies and deadlines for students within group discussions. The familiar customizable grading view also remains in SpeedGrader, allowing educators  to grade replies traditionally or within the broader discussion context. More information on these grading options can be found in this article.

Discussion showing group selection and checkpoint instructions.

What does this mean for me?

Facilitating more meaningful group discussions is now easier! Educators can now set specific reply requirements, deadlines, and assigned points to facilitate a more structured and collaborative environment for their student groups..

Wrapping up Discussion Redesign

The introduction of Group Discussion support for Discussion Checkpoints marks a major milestone. Not only as a feature release, but as the completion of our broader Discussion Redesign initiative. Over the past year, we've reimagined the discussions experience to offer instructors more control, learners more structure, and institutions more flexibility in managing asynchronous discussion. In addition to Discussion Checkpoints, the redesign initiative has also added:

• Quoting and @ mentions
• Full and partial discussion anonymity
• Flexible viewing options, including inline and split view
• View settings to select the default thread state and sort order
• Reply reporting with notifications to instructors
• Improved search with highlighting

What does this mean for future enhancements?

We’re always looking for ways to improve the current experience, and that doesn’t change now. While we’re concluding the formal Discussion Redesign project, we still have our eyes set on future updates to add even more benefits to our educators and students. 

• Discussion Checkpoints remain a Feature Option for the foreseeable future. Admins are able to enable the feature option at the account or sub-account level.
• Turnitin support - We understand how important it is for many of our customers to have the ability to utilize TurnItIn’s Plagiarism detection tool within discussions. We’re actively developing a proposed solution and plan to validate those discussions with customers in the coming months. Stay tuned for future updates coming soon. 

We want to hear from you!

As we bring this redesign effort to a close, we’d love to hear how the Discussions Checkpoints feature is working for you. Please take a moment to complete this brief survey and let us know what’s working well, and if there are any other areas we should consider for future improvement. 

Thank you for your continued partnership during this initiative, we look forward to learning ways these changes have already begun benefiting you and your institution. 

Keep learning!

[ProfessorBeyrer]

Huzzah, @SamGarza1! This is great news and now makes me an advocate for enabling this feature in my instance. I'm also grateful to read the news about plagiarism detection being in development. I hope that those future plans include making the rubrics experience more closely aligned with enhanced rubrics ( Inconsistent View -- Rubrics to Enhanced Rubrics ), including an option for self-assessment.

This is good news, @mwolfenstein. 😀

[ThonnyOliveira]

parece ótimo

[Tasha_Weaver]

Hello! Our institution uses rubrics to grade all assignments. Any future possibility of integrating rubrics into discussion checkpoints?

[hansonav]

Appreciate the updates on the Discussion Checkpoints project!

At our institution, we've been so excited for the opportunity to turn on Checkpoints as an option for instructors; the functionality to work with Groups was a major hurdle to overcome and now works with Checkpoints! We turned on Checkpoints this week with the unfortunate need to turn them back off after just a couple of days.

There are some small inconsistencies/bugs like the duplicated naming of the discussion in the course summary area, which it sounds like is being addressed by engineers. However, one of our major reasons to have to turn it off is that when Discussions with Checkpoints are enabled, they do not show up at all on the student app 'To Do' nor on the 'Course Summary' area. A student looking there would not know that the discussions exist. For our higher education institution, we know the vast majority of our students have downloaded and use the mobile app and they rely on tools like 'To Do' and the 'Course Summary' to help manage their time and workload. We reached out to Canvas support and were told the issue is known and there are no plans on fixing it. I'm not sure this would be considered intended behavior and something that isn't worth fixing.

We've already had to turn it off in our live production environment before we could do more testing to avoid folks using the tool for now, even though we couldn't discover this issue until we enabled the feature.

If you are using Checkpoints at your institution, how are you suggesting to navigate inconsistencies in where/how students see their discussions? We'd like to find solutions that are working through the community if this is not going to be fixed long term as we know many are excited to use in their courses. Thanks in advance for any suggestions as we continue to navigate the discussion redesign opportunities!

[rmartini]

@hansonav - Thanks for pointing this out with the problems in the mobile app. I missed this in my own review. I reached out to our CSM about it (while we don't have a lot of mobile app usage it's definitely a problem). Our CSM explained that since Checkpoints is technically a new feature, the functionality needs to be added and not "fixed," so the way it's marked in the Known Issue is misleading. If you go to the roadmap, you'll see it mentioned under "Deepening Student Engagement." So the good news is they're working on it!! 

We just turned checkpoints on today at my institution. For now, I've just updated our knowledgebase article about Checkpoints to note the inconsistency and will rely on students selecting the "Due Dates" link in the discussion...though this would be another good reason to just display the due dates on the actual discussion page instead of relying on students to click a link (I've always feared those dates would be easy to miss). 

[hansonav]

@rmartini Glad to see it in the roadmap! It wasn't something we caught right away either until we already had it in production since we couldn't test with a student in Beta on a mobile device, so didn't want others to miss it with a new school year starting up! I'm hopeful it will be added and to see the differences in that the functionality needs to be added instead of being "fixed". Hopefully that distinction can be refined as new tools are released and we communicate trying to figure out if something just isn't working correctly or the features still need to be added (it can be hard to tell sometimes).

I have the same worries as you sometimes with the dates getting missed, but hopefully the knowledgebase article will help folks redirect as needed for students as they begin using checkpoints. Thanks for sharing your strategy!

[dgray]

Please tell me y'all really mean "Plagiarism Framework support" and not specifically TurnItIn. I'd hate to see that oft requested enhancement turn out to be vendor-specific.