Ed Discussion for Instructors & TAs

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• What Is Ed Discussion?
• Activating Ed Discussion
• New Features
• Downloading Ed Discussion onto your Mobile Device
• Additional Resources

What Is Ed Discussion? 

Ed Discussion is an asynchronous discussion tool that provides a platform for students and instructors to interact through threaded discussions. Students can answer one another's questions, work on and run code together, embed video, annotate images, and share documents. Ed Discussion also provides an area to scaffold coding lessons for instructors as well as coding environments for many different coding languages.

With Ed Discussion, an instructor can endorse student responses. Students can like one another's posts, post anonymously, and receive instructor feedback all in one place.

Ed Discussion's features foster community and peer learning. Additionally, students may opt to use Ed Discussion to ask questions, which could reduce emails to the instructor.

Activating Ed Discussion

Wait to "Activate" Ed Discussion until the first day of class when students can access the published course site. If an instructor activates Ed Discussion earlier, an email is sent to students alerting them that they are enrolled in Ed Discussion. Students then try to access the course, which may not be published yet. This leads to confusion for students.

• Please note: Instructors can edit categories and additional settings in Ed Discussion before the course begins without needing the "activate" button. 

New Features

Ed Discussion recently added additional functionality, these two features are called Lessons and Workspaces.

• Lessons can incorporate coding challenges and can be set up similarly to Canvas modules to scaffold content for students inside of Ed Discussion.
• Workspaces provide an interactive coding environment available to instructors and students allowing them to manipulate code.

To enable these features first navigate to the settings area of Ed Discussion. Simply check the boxes next to Lessons and Workspaces and you will find these two new features enabled in the course along the top horizontal navigation bar. The command line graphic represents Workspaces while a person reading a book icon represents Lessons. (picture below)

To learn more about these new features, please see the Ed Discussion help guides located inside Ed Discussion. These are located beneath the icon with your initial and after selecting "Help" from the dropdown menu.

Downloading Ed Discussion onto your Mobile Device

Please follow the steps listed on Penn's InfoCanvas Ed Discussion page for instructions on how to download the app and enable push notifications.

Additional Resources

• The attached "Quick Start Guide" gives a great preview of Ed Discussion and how threads will appear. 
• For more helpful guides, please log in to Ed Discussion by going to https://edstem.org, select your region, and then Help with Using Ed Discussion. 
• If you are already at the Ed Discussion Dashboard, you can click on the person icon or initial, found in the upper right-hand side of the screen, and then use the dropdown menu to select "Help."

Please reach out to online-Learning-help@sas.upenn.edu if you have questions.