Specifying Forums for Notification and Counts
In my classes, I have multiple forums;
- Graded discussion questions
- Questions about class or assignments
- Group discussions (student groups)
Each forum should have the options (forum level)
- Notify me when students post - useful for Questions
- Use in count on home page - good to exclude student group discussions, which really do not need to be addressed.
I posted this to the feature request, and it may have gotten noticed. I am not sure since Brightspace customer relations (outside of sales) do not seem to exist. This is low-hanging fruit, and I've found plenty of faculty who would be very happy if we had some simple features like this (I have others). My email is ronald.eaglin@daytonastate.edu. I am a software developer. I even worked on WebCT (the precursor of today's LMS's). I'm curious who reads this, pop me an email if you agree (or disagree) with this feature.
Answers
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Hi Ronald, I hope you are doing well!
My name is Mohammad from the Technical Support team. I agree that these are great recommendations, and it seems like you have followed the correct steps in terms of creating a feature request. At this stage, the feature requests will be reviewed by the respected team to evaluate whether this feature will be added or not.
The responsible team will update the threads within the feature request item and I would encourage if you have additional inputs in this regard please update the feature request item, so that the teams that are in charge of making decisions get your updates.
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Thanks - I was hoping to give you guys some nice features that are relatively easy to implement. I really am simply analyzing the workflow of a typical faculty member. I can make this simple;
- Login
- Review any questions (from discussions) that need answering
- Review any new Assignments or other gradable submissions that have been turned in.
This is obviously for all classes being taught. I even had my HCI class design better interfaces to some of these by analyzing the workflows and applying HCI techniques (CW, HE, etc) to the user requirements. Brightspace is a good product, but it still has not gone from a decent User Interface to an excellent User Experience, but it could.
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Hi, Ron.
I'm reading this too, and I'm a Brightspace admin. 😉I searched for your PIE request briefly but couldn't find it—what # is it? (Friendly tip: always share the reference number if posting/mentioning elsewhere on Brightspace Community—that way others who happen on your comment can go take a look and upvote it if they're so inclined.)
"Notify me when students post" can already be accomplished by subscribing to the forum, so although requesting a tick-box in discussion settings would make this more speedy/convenient for instructors when they create their forums, I can't say I see it as a genuine software deficiency and/or urgent need (but as I said, I'm an admin—not an instructor).
As for "Use in count on home page", I agree it's annoying there isn't more granularity possible in what shows up on the updates icons... however if more granularity outside of visiting the actual Discussions pages in your courses is what you're after, what about leveraging Quick Eval? It displays results for all courses in one place and also has filtering capabilities.
Have you seen the ? It shows what D2L's development priorities are. I find it helpful in informing/tempering my expectations related to approval of PIE feature requests.
No doubt your developer background will make every little software imperfection and/or inelegance (as compared to other systems you've known) stick out to you like a sore thumb. I empathize, but it's apparent from the PIE area that D2L gets reams of requests and has to be selective in what they will pursue and implement. That's just life. -
Yes, there are some nice items on the roadmap.
I do see items in the roadmap that will come in handy. I'm particularly interested in enhancements ot the quizzing module.
I think the development team (HCI specialists) could use some time working through the workflows of some actual faculty.
Refinement (perfecting) day-to-day items in typical faculty workflows would make faculty happy. Happy faculty are loyal to the product. I've done this for a long time, customer loyalty in an ever-changing software landscape. Something I make sure every student in software development knows when they leave my classes.
