Course discussions improvements

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3800.13.0 | Release to Production 2 July 2020
Ultra Course View

In the Ultra Course View, students currently can create their own discussion topics. This sometimes causes confusion in the student workflow when responding to discussions. With this release, instructors can decide if they want students to generate their own discussions or not. By default, students won't be able to create discussions. When students are allowed to create discussions, a label appears under discussion titles to show they were student-created.

Note that the plus sign and the menu now appear in the upper-right corner of the Discussions page along with the new settings icon.

More on the instructor view of discussions

We also made several styling changes and usability improvements to the course discussions workflow, which include:

  • The Grader role can't modify a discussion by default, but an administrator can grant that permission if it's needed.
  • Students can delete the discussions they created if no one else has responded.