5.1 Discussion Interactions

Presently Canvas does not have a built-in discussion analytical tool that helps faculty understand how students interacted with their peers in Canvas discussion forums, and whether students were actively engaged in discussions.

In order to address these questions, we built self-service tools that harness the discussion data and generate a visualization for the discussion interactions. Course instructors can leverage the results to inform student discussion participation and facilitate greater discussion engagement. In this module, we first introduce the application of a network visualization in the analysis of discussion interactions. In the exercise activity, you will practice how to gather the discussion data using an userscript, load the data in a Shiny app that builds network diagrams to present student discussion interactions.

Learning Objectives

Upon completing this module, course participants should be able to:

• install an userscript that gathers discussion data for an entire course
• understand the common fields included in the discussion raw data
• create an edge list that includes from (reply_author) and to (initial_thread_author) fields, and load the discussion data to a discussion analytical app
• use the diagrams to inform student discussion participation and facilitate greater discussion engagement