As part of an effort to improve the navigation of the Discussions application within the learning experience, we are working on updates to the navigation that should help learners more easily find discussions they are interested in. This is the first step on a path of numerous improvements to the discussion forums, the nexts steps for which are also detailed below.
Discussion Navigation Today
Today, when learners land on the discussion forum they are presented with a list of all posts, organized either by most recent activity, most activity, or most votes depending on their selected sorting option. As many posts are created through the in-context discussion module within the course experience, titles can be unclear and thus finding interesting or relevant posts can be difficult.
Discussion Navigation Changes
In a week or so, we will be updating the discussion application so that learners see the topic list first upon landing in the discussion forums. They can still select “All Posts” from this menu, but the topic organization will now be more obvious to learners in this view.
A new header area will provide additional visibility into the location of a post when learners navigate to a specific topic area. This header will also include search and the ability to add a new post as well. Selecting All Topics will let learners get back to the full topic list.
In addition, we’ve made a few changes to how posts are listed to help make read, unread, and actively selected posts easier to identify. Unread posts will have consistent blue coloring, and posts you have read in the past that have new updated will more directly expose the number of new comments. Actively selected posts will have a gray background to make it easier to tell which post you are viewing.
