Discussions
Recommendations and suggestions for the Discussion forum
The Discussion Forum in Canvas is available to everyone in a course. Ask your students to use this forum to write something that concerns their fellow students. The course template includes a forum in the first module called General Discussion Forum.
If the course contains mandatory discussion forums, we recommend that you click on the option Graded. You can then see who participated and you can assess each student's post separately. This is also an effective way to have all students comment on each other's submitted texts ahead of a seminar.
Tip: For students to get to know each other, you can create an introductory task where they have to introduce themselves in a discussion forum and respond to other students' posts. This helps generate discussion.
Canvas has good support for discussion forums for group work. As soon as students belong to a group, they get a discussion forum that they can access via the group's page. Teachers can also create group discussion forums by selecting Group discussion. Read more about this further down.
General discussion forum
You can add a discussion forum directly from a module or from Discussions in the course menu.
- Click on Discussions.
- If you have several active discussion forums, you can filter to find only unread posts.
- To search for a specific student or title of a post, use the search box at the top.
- If you want to create a new discussion forum, click +Discussion.
- For each discussion that contains at least one answer, there are two numbers. The first number (blue) shows how many unread replies you have in that discussion. The second number shows how many answers there are in total.
Edit or delete a post
If a student contacts you to say there is an error in a post that they cannot edit, it may be due to the settings. You can either change the settings or edit the problematic post. To edit or delete a student's post, click on the three small dots to the right of the post.
Grade a discussion post
If you want to enable grading of a post in a discussion forum, select the Graded discussion setting when you create the forum.
- Check the box to make it a Graded discussion. This means that the discussion will appear in Grades.
- Enter the maximum number of points.
- Choose how the assessment will appear for students. We recommend 1 point and Complete/Incomplete for easy management.
Further down the page, you can set a submission date and specify a date when the discussion should be locked for further posts. Remember to save and publish.
Group discussion
If you want a discussion forum to be a group discussion, check the This is a group discussion option when you create the discussion. If you have not already created groups, a box will appear where you must fill in the name for a new group set. If you have already created the group set you want, you can select it from the list. Otherwise, click the New Group Category button. Your title, instructions and introductory text in the discussion are then copied to each group's discussion. Only the members of a group can see their own group's posts. Teachers can now send the same post to all groups or enter each group discussion and make separate posts for the group using the links that appear when a new group discussion is created.