The Quercus Support Resources have moved to a new home with the Center for Teaching Support and Innovation (CTSI).
View all of the new support pages for the Academic Toolbox at:

UofT.me/q-resources

The information on this page is no longer being updated.
The new support page for this can be found at this link:

https://teaching.utoronto.ca/tool-guides/quercus-discussions/

Discussions are a commonly used tool in Quercus that allow course participants to have an online conversation. Instructors may wish to use discussions for assessment and require students to post messages and respond to other students in the course. Instructors may also use discussions as a way share content and information with students.

Student file attachments for non-graded Discussions are counted towards their personal quota. Attachments for graded discussions are not counted.

Discussion Page:

1. Course options that can be toggled for Student Settings (via settings cog icon near the top right):

Students can Create discussion topics
- Selecting this option will enable the [+Discussion] for students and allow them to create discussion topics in the same way an instructor can.
Students can Edit and delete their own discussion replies.
Students can Attach files to discussions

2. All discussions are a single topic, not separate threads.

3. "Pinned Discussions" are sorted by the instructor, "Discussions" are sorted by most recent activity.

Online discussion with and between students in a course can be a very powerful and effective teaching tool. Quercus has a built-in discussion tool, and at the University of Toronto, Instructors also have the option of using either PeppeR, Piazza, or Ed Discussion. Instructors should be aware that once a discussion board is enabled, they should carefully monitor the correspondence in the discussion to make sure students are using the tool effectively. Instructors who have not built this monitoring into their course's design may wish to avoid turning on discussion tools. For more about best teaching practices, please visit the Centre for Teaching Support & Innovation's discussion board-related resources.

There are a variety of features in each Discussion board - for a comparison of some features offered in each specific board, please see this chart here.

More about Discussions in the Canvas Guides

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