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Brightspace Tip #384: New Discussion Creation Experience

The new Discussion creation experience was one of the changes implemented with our April 2023 Continuous Delivery update. The new Discussion creation experience brings create and edit consistency changes from Assignments and Quizzes to Discussions.

D2L’s goal with the redesign is to simplify common tasks for first-time or infrequent users, while giving easy access to the advanced features that experienced power-users love. This first release is at full parity with classic discussions and brings refreshed workflows and improvements to restricting group topics and threads, associating topics to forums, and wording changes to a few settings that you may be familiar with.

The new discussion creation and editing experience
The new discussion creation and editing experience

The primary panel on the left contains the same frequently-used fields as Assignments and Quizzes. These fields are most relevant to learners and are core to discussion topic creation. The right-hand panel provides advanced options such as start and end dates and release conditions. These options follow the same logical groupings as found in Assignments and Quizzes. Other topic-specific settings can be found in the right-hand panel.

Availability Dates and Conditions Accordion
Availability Dates and Conditions Accordion

While the right-hand groupings are collapsed, the summary text provides details about which settings are active so you can see which settings are applied at a glance.

Other Notable Changes

Beyond the restructuring of the topic creation page for consistency, the new experience also includes updates and wording changes to a few settings that you may be familiar with. These changes are designed to simplify workflows and to align more closely with the Daylight patterns. Here's a list of the notable changes:

  • Automatically create a new forum with same name and visibility as a new topic
  • Checkboxes now radio buttons for Allow anonymous posts and Users must start a thread
  • Topic type selector replaced by Manage Restrictions workflow
  • Restricting topic and separate threads
  • Restricting topic using groups and section restrictions
  • Availability Dates consistency

Refer to the Introducing the New Discussion Creation Experience knowledge article for an in-depth look at all the feature and capability changes with this update.

Switch Between New and Old Experience

If you’ve tried the new discussion creation experience, but aren’t quite ready to commit to it, then switch back. Switching back is simple. You can switch between the new discussion creation experience and the old experience by clicking on the arrow in the upper right corner of the create/edit discussion page.

Switch between the new discussion creation experience and the old experience
Switch between the new discussion creation experience and the old experience

Want More Information?

Introducing the New Discussion Creation Experience
Using the Brightspace Discussions Tool

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