Discussions Tips
In case of a large class, online discussion can be designed as group discussions by dividing the class into small discussion groups. Each group will have its own discussion thread. To set up group discussions, simply create a group set in the People tab.
Choose a group set name. Students can be either manually or automatically (randomly) included into groups of a desired size.
In discussion settings, check the “This is a Group Discussion” checkbox, and then assign the discussion to the group created in People.
IT has received numerous reports of an issue with group discussions in which students were able to post in the course-wide conversation rather than group-specific ones. This appears to be caused by Canvas not automatically creating the necessary group-specific conversations when the discussion was first created.
While there is no permanent solution yet, there are two workarounds.
Workaround 1
When creating a new group discussion, avoid clicking the Save & Publish button. Click the Save button first, and then publish it right after or later. In testing, these separate actions ensure the group-specific conversations are created properly.
Workaround 2
If the Save & Publish button was used, the missing group-specific conversations can still be created, simply by accessing them. This can be achieved by the instructor or TA clicking on each group in the blue banner at the top of the discussion.