Discussions

The Discussions tab is where you browse, create, and manage your class’s discussion channels — group spaces for announcements, topic-specific Q&A, assignment help, and general class conversation. It’s the default tab when you open the Inbox. Students see and participate in the same channels from their Campus Inbox.

Only staff (Console, Admin, People, Studio, and Analytics apps) can create channels — students have no create-channel option in their app.

Accessing Discussions

1. Open the Inbox — it opens on Discussions by default.
2. If you’re on another tab, click Discussions in the tab bar to come back to it.

What the Discussions List Shows

Each channel is listed with:

Column	Description
Name	The channel’s icon/emoji and name — click to open it
Message	The creator’s avatar and display name
Date	When the channel was created
Actions	Edit or delete the channel

Note

The Message column is a mislabel — it actually shows who created the channel, not a message. Visibility and message-count aren’t shown as columns here, even though that data exists.

Searching and Sorting

• Use the search bar to find a channel by name
• Sort by Name, Message (creator), or Date

Creating a New Channel

1. Click the + (Create new) button in the Inbox header.
2. Select Discussion.

Fill in the channel details:

Field	Description
Name	A clear, descriptive name (e.g. “Science Q&A”, “Week 3 Assignment Help”)
Icon	Optional — upload an image to represent the channel
Status	Public (whole organization) or Private (only students you assign)

3. Click Create — the channel is created immediately and added to the Discussions list.

Students will see it in their Campus Inbox automatically if it’s public, or once assigned if it’s private.

Note

Channels you create here are the same channels students see in their Campus Inbox under the Discussions tab. Everything is shared in real time.

Opening a Channel

Click on any channel’s name to open its detail view. There are three icons in the channel header:

Icon	Opens
Pencil	Rename the channel inline
Chat bubble	The Chat view — posts, comments, and replies
Person	The Access view — who can see and participate

Note

A channel opens on the Access view by default, not Chat.

Channel Visibility

Setting	Who can see and participate
Public	Every student in your organization, automatically
Private	Only students you’ve explicitly assigned via the Access view, plus the creator

Managing Access

The Access view (person icon) is a searchable list of your organization’s students, each with a checkbox and a message count showing how active they’ve been in that channel.

Visibility	How Access behaves
Public	Every student already has access — the checkboxes here are disabled since membership is automatic
Private	Only students whose checkbox is checked (plus the channel’s creator) can see or participate

Use the Assign / Unassign buttons to add or remove students in bulk on a private channel. Unassigning a student removes their future access immediately, but doesn’t delete anything they already posted — their past posts and comments remain visible to everyone who still has access.

Renaming a Channel

1. Open the channel.
2. Click the pencil icon in the channel header.
3. Edit the name inline and confirm.

Note

The pencil icon renames inline. To change the icon or switch visibility (Public/Private), use Actions → Edit on the Discussions list.

Deleting a Channel

1. From the Discussions list, find the channel’s row.
2. Open the Actions menu and select Delete.
3. Confirm the deletion.

Caution

Deleting a channel permanently removes it and all its posts, comments, and replies. This cannot be undone, and there’s no way to archive a channel instead — deletion is the only option.

Posting, Commenting & Replying

Open the Chat view (chat-bubble icon) to see the conversation. Discussions have exactly one level of nesting: Post → Comment → Reply.

1. Post — a top-level entry: a question, announcement, or topic to open up for discussion.
2. Comment — a response to a post.
3. Reply — a response to a specific comment.

To add any of these: type your message (or click the mic icon to dictate — it transcribes your speech directly into the text box), optionally attach a single image via the paperclip icon (text is optional if you’ve attached an image), then send. There’s no character limit. A new post notifies every member of the channel except you.

Note

You can’t reply to a reply — the system blocks it at two levels of nesting. If you need to continue the thread, add another comment on the original post.

Reactions

Click the reaction icon, or an existing reaction pill, to react to a post, comment, or reply with one of 8 emoji: 👍 👎 😄 🎯 😐 ❤️ 🔥 👀. Click + to open the full picker.

• You can have one active reaction at a time — picking a different emoji swaps your previous one rather than stacking; clicking your current reaction again removes it.
• The number on each emoji pill is how many people reacted with it.

Note

Students see a different emoji set in their Campus app: 👍 👎 ❤️ 😂 😮 😢 🔥 ✨.

Marking an Answer

Only the channel’s creator can mark a comment or reply as the accepted answer:

1. Find the comment or reply that answers the question.
2. Open its ••• menu and click Mark as answer (Unmark as answer to undo).

The post gets an “Answered” badge, and any previous answer on that post is automatically unmarked.

This option isn’t available to students at all.

Tip

Use Mark as Answer actively — it turns your channel into a searchable knowledge base for the class. Students can scan through questions and see which ones have been resolved at a glance.

Editing and Deleting

Content	Who can edit	Who can delete
Post	Its author only	Its author, or the channel’s creator
Comment or reply	Its author, or the channel’s creator	Its author, or the channel’s creator

Use the ”…” menu on the post, comment, or reply to edit or delete it. Students can only edit or delete their own comments and replies — they don’t have a channel creator’s moderation ability over other students’ content.

Note

There’s no pinning and no report/flag option anywhere in Discussions.

Visible to Staff Only

Separate from Public/Private membership, every channel has a “Visible to staff only” toggle that controls how much of the conversation other students can see from each other — not whether they can see the channel at all.

Who can toggle it	Any staff member who can open the channel — it isn’t limited to the creator, and students never see this control
When OFF (default)	Normal open discussion — every comment and reply is visible to everyone in the channel
When ON	Top-level posts are unaffected — everyone still sees every post. But comments and replies become filtered per student: the channel’s creator always sees every comment and reply from everyone, while each student only sees comments/replies that are their own or the creator’s

In effect, turning this on splits the comment section under each post into private, parallel staff↔student threads — one student can’t see another student’s comments or replies, but everyone can still see the creator’s.

Notifications

Discussions trigger real-time notifications for:

• Being added to a channel
• A new post (sent to every member except the poster)
• Someone commenting on your post
• Someone replying to your comment
• Your comment being marked as the answer

There’s no per-channel notification mute or settings option, for staff or students.

Staff View vs. Student View

Students use a separate, simpler view of channels — it’s not just a restricted version of the Console experience:

• No “Visible to staff only” toggle, no Access view, no rename option
• A different reaction emoji set than staff see
• No way to create a channel
• Can only edit or delete their own comments — not others’, the way a channel creator can

Not Supported

• Pinned posts
• Read receipts
• Search or filter of posts/comments within a channel (search only works at the channel-list level)
• Archiving — deleting a channel is permanent