Threaded Discussions
Display of Multiple Topics | Visual Editor for Student Responses | User-Defined Subject Text | Editable Subject Line | Threaded Discussion Preview | Thread Post Options | New User Interface Elements | Date/Time stamp | View a Filtered List of Thread Responses | Author Enhancements to Threaded Discussions | Threaded Discussion Gradebook Details
In the course or student view of a threaded discussion content item, a number of new features have been added with the .NExT release.
Display of Multiple Topics
In place of a drop-down list from which users navigate to the desired topic, all topic titles will display at once in the "Topics" section at the top of the main threaded discussion page. If there is only one topic, the "Topics" section will not display. This will eliminate student confusion around navigating to the correct topic.
Visual Editor for Student Responses
Students will now have the Visual Editor available to them when responding in a threaded discussion. They will not have the HTML view, the link wizard, or the Math Equation Editor in their version of the Visual Editor.
User-Defined Subject Text
When a user creates a top-level response to a topic by clicking on the Respond button at the top of the topic area, the user will be prompted to provide a subject for the response. All responses to that initial or top-level response will carry this same subject heading. This use of a user-defined subject that is inherited by all sub-responses makes it much easier to follow a thread of communication within a large threaded discussion. In the screenshot below, Learning by Example is the user-provided subject for the 2nd response to the Managerial Styles topic.
User-Provided Subject
Editable Subject Line
In the case a Threaded Discussions digresses off topic or goes into depth over a particular subject within topic, the Subject Line can be edited to properly reflect the current nature of the discussion. The ability to edit subject lines when writing a response to a Thread is enabled in Threaded Discussion Preferences within Course Admin.
Threaded Discussion Preview
This new functionality allows you and your students to view the first sentence or two of a Thread response without having to expand the entire response to see what is being discussed. This provides the ability to easily identify thread posts of interest.
Thread Post Options
After clicking on the respond button to respond to a thread, users will see options to:
- Post their response
- Cancel the action
- Preview the post before formally posting it
New User Interface Elements
If a thread is unread, the contracted listing will be displayed in bold and with a closed envelope icon next to it. This more closely resembles the MS Outlook identification of messages that have not yet been read.
If a thread is posted by an instructor, the contracted listing will be displayed in yellow highlight. The instructor name will have his/her prefix (ie. Professor) to easily distinguish instructor postings from student postings.
Date/Time stamp
The date/timestamp will display in the time zone of the current viewer. It will be formatted according to the country-specific rules dictated by the user's profile locale (language + country combination).
Threaded Discussion - Course View
View a Filtered List of Thread Responses
One dilemma often faced by instructors in a threaded discussion area is how to get more quickly to the posts that require attention when hundreds are listed. The .NExT release provides new filtering mechanisms to do just this.
When Show Options is selected, users are provided with new tools to filter their view of thread postings, allowing them to see only unread posts, for example. To first identify the posts that the user wants to see in a more limited view, the user can either select a group of threads via the Select pull-down menu (all, unread, read, etc.) or the user can manually select threads by clicking on the check boxes next to the threads they want to see in the filtered list. If, for example, the user wants to view only threads by a particular author or threads that were posted on a particular date, the user can first sort the posts by clicking on the column header. It is then easier to manually select that group of posts.
Once the desired posts are selected (via selected check boxes), the user then clicks on the View Selected icon and only the selected threads will be displayed in the list. The user can then open, close, respond to, and mark any of the posts as read or unread.
New Feature: View Selected option
Author Enhancements to Threaded Discussions
In the Author view of threaded discussion content items, instructors or course builders can now reorder the list of thread topics. Simply click on the down or up arrow next to a topic to change its order in the list. All thread responses in the topic will automatically move with the topic to its new position.
Authors can also delete an entire topic within a threaded discussion - including all of the included posts - by clicking on the Delete symbol next to the topic.
Reorder & Delete Topics in Author view of Threaded Discussions
Threaded Discussion Gradebook Details
In addition to the enhancements in the Threaded Discussion content item itself, the number of responses to each topic per person will now display in the Gradebook Details view for a gradable threaded discussion content item. When viewing an individual's responses in the Gradebook, the instructor will see a tally of how many responses that student made to each topic to assist in the grading process, in addition to those posts themselves.
Number of Responses per Topic in the Gradebook Details View
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