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@Joshua.V.999 I believe I am tagging the correct individual (we met at D2L Fusion 2026 in Phoenix in the Builders Lab), but I think I may have found my answer.

Hi @Stephen.R.50 and @Matt.W.287 — thank you both for looking into this. I wanted to circle back and share that I did find a working approach, in case it helps anyone else who lands here.

The key insight is that discussion feedback isn't exposed through the Discussions API — it surfaces through the Grades API, provided the topic is associated with a grade item. The "Overall Feedback" an instructor enters in Quick Eval or the discussion grading interface is written to the grade value's Comments field, not to anything under /discussions/.

Here's the chain I ended up with (LE v1.95, LP v1.58):

1. Pull grade objects and find the discussion-linked ones

GET /d2l/api/le/1.95/{orgUnitId}/grades/

Each grade object may carry an AssociatedTool property. For discussions, AssociatedTool.ToolId === 3000, and AssociatedTool.ToolItemId is the discussion TopicId. That gives you a topic → grade-item map:

if (tool && tool.ToolId === 3000 && tool.ToolItemId) {
  discussionGradeMap[tool.ToolItemId] = gradeObject.Id;
}

(For reference, ToolId === 51000 is Quizzes, and assignments come through the Dropbox API — same pattern works for those.)

2. Enumerate topics so you have names/IDs to join against

GET /d2l/api/le/1.95/{orgUnitId}/discussions/forums/
GET /d2l/api/le/1.95/{orgUnitId}/discussions/forums/{forumId}/topics/

3. Pull grade values for each discussion-linked grade item

GET /d2l/api/le/1.95/{orgUnitId}/grades/{gradeObjectId}/values/?pageSize=200

4. Read feedback off the returned GradeValue

This was the piece that took me a few tries. A student has instructor feedback when GradeValue.Comments.Html or GradeValue.Comments.Text is non-empty:

var hasFeedback = v.GradeValue && v.GradeValue.Comments &&
  ((v.GradeValue.Comments.Html && v.GradeValue.Comments.Html.trim().length > 0) ||
   (v.GradeValue.Comments.Text && v.GradeValue.Comments.Text.trim().length > 0));

Worth noting: I initially checked Comments.Content (the RichText shape documented elsewhere) and got zero hits across courses I knew had feedback. Dumping the raw GradeValue JSON for a graded student showed the payload uses Html and Text. If you're getting empty results, that's the first thing I'd check.

The same object also answers "who left it and when":

• GradeValue.LastModified → feedback timestamp
• GradeValue.LastModifiedBy → the instructor's user ID (resolvable to a name via the classlist/enrollments API)

Taking the max LastModified across students with non-empty comments gives you a per-topic "last feedback given" date, which is what my dashboard surfaces.

I verified this against a course where an instructor had graded a discussion via Quick Eval — all six students who posted came back with both a grade and populated Comments.Html.

The important caveat — where your answer still holds

This only works for discussion topics associated with a grade item. For a topic with no linked grade item, there are no grade values to inspect, and I found no reliable API path to determine whether an instructor left feedback. The ScoreOutOf/ScoredCount fields on the topic object only tell you a score was entered, not that written feedback exists. So for ungraded discussions, "not available via API" appears to still be the correct answer.

It's also specifically the grading feedback that's detectable — an instructor replying inline within the thread as a post is a different thing and isn't captured here.

Hope this saves someone else some time.