[Discussions] Student Work Over Time

[JihanMcDonald]

I am an Instructor and it would be wonderful for all of a student's posts to be aggregated so that I can see the development of their posts/discussions throughout the semester. As it is, or as far as my understanding of Canva goes, I have to go back into each Discussion post, search for their particular post, and do this for every single item I've asked them to reflect on. This is not only tedious from a user experience perspective, but it also makes my evaluative process choppy in a way that does neither me nor them a service. This would be particularly helpful come grading time as an evaluation tool of not just the quantitative data but the qualitative growth of their ideas and their voice. I also believe that this would be a useful reflective tool for students themselves to be able to track their qualitative progress throughout the course of a semester. 

[bsrinvasan]

Problem statement:

It would be very helpful if Canvas can show all posts by a single student throughout the semester. Our instructors use online discussion boards as a complement to in class discussion, and being able to easily see all of a student’s contributions to those discussions over the semester is important for assessing participation from a holistic view. This also allows instructors to assess a student’s improvement in quality writing on the same page, instead of having to go back and forth through various discussion forums. IMPACT: To grade a student’s contributions effectively, they need to be able to review them as a whole body of work holistically, not just as a quantitative count of how many posts a student has posted.

Proposed solution:

By clicking a user’s profile and having the option to “see all posts by this user” within a given time frame, this issue should be possible to be solved. Since other LMSs’ such as Brightspace and Moodle are able to do it – as are countless internet message boards, Canvas should be able to as well. We hope Canvas adds this functionality.

User role(s):

admin,instructor,ta,observer

[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.