Thread Templates

Thread templates are a way of prompting students to ask better questions by giving them more structure. This eliminates a lot of back and forth when students don’t include all of the necessary information to answer their questions. This helps to keep discussion high quality and reduces work for everyone.

Thread templates can be set up per category and are configured on the Admin  page.

Whenever a student creates new questions for the Assignments category, they would be presented with the template to fill.

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Staff-only Comments

Staff-only comments allow instructors to have a private conversation within threads. These comments are visible only to instructors and are not visible to students. To post a staff-only comment, tick the Visible to Staff Only box when posting a comment.

Staff-only comments are displayed with “Visible to staff only” in red.

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Mentions

Instructors are able to mention other instructors in comments and answers. This will send a notification to the person who has mentioned it and direct them to the comment. This allows you to loop in other instructors in the conversation.

To do this, type the @ symbol and a list of instructors will appear. Note that students are unable to use the @ syntax to mention instructors.

The instructor that was mentioned will receive a notification.

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Megathreads and Anonymous comments

When creating a Post, instructors have the option of making a Megathread.

Megathreads allow you to collate all questions on a specific topic into a single thread. You can think of it as a live-growing FAQ. Each top-level comment made on the megathread is a separate question and be marked as resolved individually. This works quite well for short questions that benefit everyone. If a student has a more detailed inquiry, they should still make a separate thread for their question.

Comments on a megathread can be set to anonymous. Each poster will be assigned a randomly generated animal name instead. You can use this feature in conjunction with megathreads to run AMAs (Ask Me Anything), a Live lecture Q&A or just a megathread for a particular assignment.

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Moderation Tools

Locking Threads

Admin and staff are able to lock threads. This essentially closes the thread and saves it. This will stop anyone from contributing or editing it further.

Example

Declining Threads

Instructors can decline a thread. This sets the thread as private and locks it. Instructors may optionally leave a message explaining why the thread was declined and suggest changes that should be made to improve the thread.

Instructors can decline threads to maintain the quality of discussion and to remove low-effort questions. Declined threads are not visible to other students.

Instructors (admin and staff roles) are able to delete any thread, answer or comment. This can be used to moderate the discussion board.

Require approval before posting

If needed, instructors can set the threads to require staff approval before they are made visible to other students. This can be used to shut down discussions during tests or exams.

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Revealing Anonymous

Instructors are able to reveal the name of an anonymous poster by hovering or clicking the Anonymous name.

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Pinning

Pinned threads will appear at the top of the thread list. These will also have a purple pinned icon . They will be ordered such that the most recently pinned will be at the top of the list.

By default, only the top 3 pins will be shown. To see all of the pinned threads, you can click to show more, which appears below the third pin.

Pinning and Unpinning

Instructors can easily pin and unpin threads by clicking on the Pin button when viewing a thread.

Effective Pinning

Here are some tips to keep the pinned section neat and tidy how to ensure this:

• Regularly unpin threads as their relevance expires.
• Avoid having many pinned threads – you can consolidate multiple pins under a single thread such as a FAQ thread.
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Archiving Courses

At the end of a course, it is recommended that the course be archived to prevent students from posting new threads and comments in the discussion. This can be done in the Advanced section of the Admin  page.

Users will still have access to all of their archived courses and the resources it contains. Archiving locks all the threads and puts them into a read-only mode so they cannot be modified.

Archiving a course will also move the course to the appropriate section in your dashboard. Active courses are listed at the top under the Courses heading and archived courses are listed under their respective year and semester. This helps to keep all of your courses organized and easy to locate for future reference.