Discussions in Canvas
Overview
This page introduces you to Discussions in Canvas, and also includes ideas about how to use your discussions page in Canvas to increase student participation and engagement with one another. This is especially important for blended and online courses, when students have less opportunity to discuss in person, but can be used as compliments to in-class activities for traditional courses as well. These ideas are meant to simply be starting places, as the possibilities for using discussions are much greater than those listed here.
This page also introduces you to 2024 Canvas Discussions Redesign that offers many exciting opportunities to bolster collaboration through many modern, flexible discussion features.
2024 Canvas Discussions Redesign
This redesign takes some of the impactful legacy functionality and gives it a modern UI, improved peer-to-peer interaction, and more robust moderation tools for instructors. No existing Discussion functionality is going away. The redesign is solely focused on elevating the current Discussion experience.
With the redesign, Canvas Discussions helps through:
Cleaner UI for accessibility
Flexible viewing options, including inline and split view
Reply reporting with notifications to instructors
Quoting functionality
Improved search with highlighting
Full and partial anonymous Discussions
Additional sorting and filtering options for users
Create a full or partial anonymous Discussion topic
Navigate to Discussions [1] from the course navigation bar.
Click “+Discussions” [2] to create a discussion topic.
Enter a topic title and content.
From the Options, you are allowed to set this discussion to be full anonymous, partial anonymous, or not anonymous at all. Neither full anonymous nor partial anonymous supports Grading and Groups.
Click “Manage Assign To” to set up who is assigned, available and the until date.
Click “Save and Publish”.
If you select partial anonymous for discussion topic, when students creating a reply, they will have the option to show their name and profile picture or remain anonymous.
Viewing Options
When you go to view reply/replies to this discussion topic, you are allow to choose “View Split Screen” or “View Inline”.
Click View Split Screen.
Click Reply/Replies from the Thread. You will see a split screen of all replies.
You can switch the viewing option to view Inline by clicking “View Inline”.
You will view all replies inline.
Quote Reply
Select one message from the thread.
Click options [1].
Choose Quote Reply [2].
Toggle on/off the button for including quoted reply in message or not.
Choose reply anonymously or not.
Report Reply
Students are allowed to report any inappropriate messages to their instructors.
Select one message from the thread.
Click options [1].
Choose !Report[2]
Submit a report reply.
Improved search with highlighting
Enter your keywords in the search box.
Keywords are shown with highlighting.
Mentions
The redesign allows to use “@“ to mention a person while replying to a post.
Students who have their Canvas notification turned on for “New Mention" will receive an email message.
Mentions are disabled when instructors set the Discussion topic as full or partial anonymous.
You can change Canvas Discussion notification following the steps:
Go to Canvas navigation bar.
Go to Account[1].
Click Notifications [2].
You can change notifications under Discussions tab based on your needs.
Discussions Introductions
Discussions can be a great place to do student introductions at the beginning of the quarter. A teacher can create a discussion with their own introduction as the description and then encourage students to create their own. This can be taken a step further as you can encourage students to attach images or a short video of themselves answering get to know you questions to their posts.
Debate
Discussions can be graded and used as a means to discuss or debate current issues related to the course. Encourage students to thoroughly research the subject and then open the discussion topic up, allowing them to share their findings with one another. To incentivize student participation, it may be helpful to ask students to post or comment on other's posts a certain number of times. It may be helpful to assign groups of students to one side of the debate or another.
Open Discussion
You can create a discussion with no due date and an availability window that spans your entire course as a place for students to engage with the professor and one another. This can be a place for students to ask questions that they feel would benefit their classmates, to post comments or helpful links and resources for one another. This creates a unintimidating and collaborative environment for students, encouraging them to participate in this and other discussions.