Can I Move My Students' Discussions to the Proper Area?

ProfessorSean

For our first week of the semester, I posted an introductory discussion and my students were supposed to hit "reply" and post their introductions under mine. They ended up posting separate discussions each at the bottom of the discussion page. Is there a way I can move the discussions under my discussions? I'm not sure what I did wrong to have this happen. Thank you for any help.

jeremyfw

Hi @ProfessorSean

This is a very common first-week Canvas moment, and unfortunately the answer is a bit unsatisfying.

Short answer:
Nope. Canvas does not allow instructors to move student discussion posts and “re-nest” them under another post once they’ve been submitted.

Here’s what’s going on and what you can do instead.

Why this happened

In Canvas discussions, there are two different actions students can take:

• Reply → responds to an existing post (creates a threaded reply)
• Reply to Topic → creates a brand-new, top-level post

If students clicked “Reply to Topic” instead of “Reply” under your introduction, Canvas treats those as entirely separate discussions. Once posted, Canvas does not provide a tool to drag, move, or merge posts into a different thread.

You didn’t do anything wrong, this is just how the interface behaves.

What you can do now

• Leave them as-is and clarify expectations for next time
  This is the most common approach for Week 1 intros.
• Ask students to repost correctly (if it’s important)
  You can:
  • Ask them to copy/paste their intro as a reply under your post
  • Then delete or ignore the original top-level post
• Respond individually
  You can reply to each student’s top-level post to keep engagement going, even though the structure isn’t ideal.

How to prevent this next time

For future discussions, a couple of best practices help a lot:

1. Explicit instructions
   • Example: “Click Reply under my post. Do NOT click Reply to Topic.”
2. Model the behavior
   • Post your intro
   • Add a sample student reply under it
3. Use “Users must post before seeing replies” carefully
   • This can sometimes increase confusion for first-time users
4. Consider separate intro posts
   • Let students create their own threads intentionally, then reply to peers instead

Bottom line

Canvas discussions don’t support moving or re-threading posts after the fact. Once a student posts at the top level, that structure is locked in. Clear instructions and modeling are the only real safeguards.