State of Canvas 2025: Discussions 

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Last week, we took a moment to review the current status of Assignments in Canvas. This week, we’re turning our focus to Discussions. We’ve talked about Discussions a few times over the last several months because of some big updates to the tool. We’ll be going over those and more today!  

Discussion Checkpoints 

Canvas has finally added multiple due dates for discussions with their Discussion Checkpoints update earlier this year. Now, you can set one due date for students to submit initial replies to the prompt and a second due date for students to submit replies to other students. There was a moment of oddness with how discussion checkpoints appeared in SpeedGrader, but Canvas resolved all those issues! For more information, check out Canvas Update: Multiple Due Dates for Discussions.  

Discussion Summary 

Canvas has also added an AI feature to allow you to quickly generate a summary of a particular discussion. At the bottom of the discussion prompt, click the “Summarize Discussion” button. If there are specific areas or topics you want the summary to focus on, type those in the “Topics to focus on” box and click “Generate Summary.” If you just want a general summary, you can click “Generate Summary” without entering any information in the box!  

Discussion summaries are currently available, but you will need to turn them on in your course’s feature options (on the course settings page) to be able to use them! Discussion summaries are also a “feature preview” at the moment – Canvas is still working on developing this feature, so there may be some issues and errors that occur when using it.  

Removing Dedicated File Attachment Button 

Canvas is removing the dedicated file attachment button that appears below the discussion text entry box on July 19. But don’t worry – you can still add images, video, and files through the RCE toolbar in discussions and announcements. For further details, check out “Discontinuing the Attachment button in Discussion and Announcement.”  

Future Updates 

Canvas also has a handful of updates they’ve announced on their product roadmap. We don’t have much information for these at the moment, but we’ll keep y’all updated as more info is released!  

Pin Discussion Replies (Available Q2) 

With this update, instructors will be able to pin specific discussion replies to the top of the discussion.  

Check for Plagiarism (Q3/4) 

Canvas is working on adding a way to check for plagiarism to discussions. 

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We’ll keep you updated on any upcoming changes to Discussions in Canvas! In the meantime, if you want to check out any of our previous posts, check out the Discussions tag. 

If you have questions about how to implement any of these in your course, please don’t hesitate to email us at ctl@cedarville.edu.   

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