Discussion

Question

My course has rolling enrollment. I want to delete student responses to Discussion posts. Is there a way to delete a large number of responses at once or am I doomed to clicking Delete on each and every one?

ColtonSwapp · Answer

Hello @SHARONSPROLES

Thanks for posting this in the global Canvas Community!

I have to agree with @Chris_Hofer on this. Using a separate course for the new rolling enrollments would be ideal to not only keep everything separate, but also in case you need to go back for any reason to look at what was discussed by the students.

If needed, you could always set up a new discussion for the newly enrolled students and assign the discussion to specific sections that your school is rolling through it.  As an example: this will make it so that section B can't see what Section A wrote in the discussion from last year/semester. HERE is a guide on how to assign discussions to sections of students. Doing it this will will require you to have all the newly students enrolled in their own section for the rolling enrollment. You might need to work with your school on how the sections are added to the course, if you do decide to go this route.

Hopefully this helps a little bit!

-Colton

Chris_Hofer · Answer

Hi @SHARONSPROLES ...

While I understand that rolling enrollments in a course are necessary for some schools, I think a much better option is for students to be assigned to separate course shells for each semester/term (or whatever time frame you are looking at).  That way, discussion topics and replies from students are preserved.  When you start a new course, you can then copy content from the previous course into the current course.  You'll have a new set of students, and your discussion topics will be ready for the new students to respond to, and you won't have to worry about deleting past responses.  Another thing to consider...if anyone, for whatever reason, needed to obtain past discussion responses...or if there was some kind of audit on your course...or if a student challenged something in the course, you'd have no record of those past topics any more.

Again, I don't know a lot about how your school has things set up, but I wanted to share my experience as a former Canvas administrator and how other schools typically have things set up.  So, my $0.02 ... for what it's worth.  Hope this helps a bit.