Downloading Discussion Threads?

Tony.Z.837

Hi there,
I am interested in downloading an entire discussion thread from D2L, including names, who said what, and when. I need this in a single file, either in a doc or pdf format. My goal is to analyze the patterns using content analysis techniques. However, I'm having trouble figuring out how to do this on D2L. Could you provide guidance on how to achieve this? Thank you in advance for your help.

Best,
Tony

Jennifer.W.973

@Tony.Z.837 If the Default View in the Discussions settings (blue gear icon in top right corner) is Grid View, you can select the posts you want and then click Print for the full text of the posts.

Philip.W.864

@Jennifer.W.973 When was this printing feature released? We just discovered it this morning.

Ben.V.940

I have the same question Tony asked. I am in Grid View, however it pages* the discussion posts, only displaying 20 posts per page. There is no option to select all posts across the (7) pages. Please tell me I do not have to print each page individually and merge them ex post.

A second suggestion would be to allow instructors to export the posts as text data in a spreadsheet, rather than as a pdf. As an example of how this could work, Piazza is an External Learning Tool for discussions that exports posts, user info., and timestamps in spreadsheet form, making it much easier to analyze than a pdf.

*This is a wider-ranging criticism I have of Brightspace, i.e., that it defaults to paging lists 10 or 20 at a time and sometimes does not even allow me to increase the page size.

Jennifer.W.973

@Philip.W.864 @Tony.Z.837 @Ben.V.940 I just finished writing some HTML/JavaScript for downloading all posts in a course by extracting the data through the API. I'm still testing it, but it appears to be working for us so far, either as a custom homepage widget or just a regular HTML page within Content. My code is on GitHub if you want to try it out: https://github.com/jenniferwagner18/d2l-brightspace-widgets

Gabriel.T.493

Hi Ben,

Although some tools do allow changing the pagination number (such as the Gradebook and the Classlist) the Discussions tool does not possess this feature.

Additionally, increasing the limit from 20 posts per page is not planned at the moment (20 per Page Limit on Discussion Boards: View Submission)

Apologies for the inconvenience, but since there's no native way to print all the discussion posts at once, this might need to be done manually)

Best Regards,

Gabriel.