Ed Discussion for Students

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• What Is Ed Discussion?
• Important Key for Understanding Thread Icons
• Downloading Ed Discussion onto your Mobile Device
• Notifications
• Profile Settings
• Lessons and Workspaces
• Additional Support

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. 

Instructors may also toggle on additional features in Ed Discussion to allow for hands-on coding practice with Lessons or collaboration in Workspaces. More on these two features in the "Lessons and Workspaces" heading below.

Many instructors prefer that you use Ed Discussion to ask questions instead of emailing them directly so the whole class can benefit from the question. When posting a question, you can select "Post Anonymously" so only the instructor can see who is asking.

Ed Discussion allows for many filtering preferences. Students can favorite threads, filter by most recent thread, or by category of question, such as seeing all questions pertaining to lectures. The discussion board is also searchable.

Important Key for Understanding Thread Icons

• Threads with a blue dot are unread. These are threads that you have not seen.
• Threads with a green tick are questions that have been resolved. This means that the question has already been answered.
• Threads with a purple pin have been pinned. Pinned threads are generally reserved for announcements or important information.
• Threads with a blue ribbon have been endorsed by course instructors. This is usually done by instructors to distinguish high-quality content.

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.

Notifications

In the upper right corner of your screen, next to the home dashboard, you will see a bell icon indicating notifications. 

The notifications are organized by date with a section for "All" notifications and "Unread" notifications. There is also an icon enabling you to mark all notifications as "Read." 

Similar to the color scheme when posting a new thread, any item that is unread appears blue, while the notifications you have already read are grayed out as shown below:

Please note that you will not receive Ed Discussion notifications via Canvas directly, as this is an LTI tool existing as a separate application.

To customize your notification settings, see the Profile Settings section below.

Profile Settings

In Ed Discussion, there are ways to further customize your user experience in the Settings tab under your account profile:

From the Account section pictured above, check to make sure your primary email address is set to your Penn email address. This way, you will receive all Ed Discussion notification emails at this address. 

For added security measures, you can also set a password or enable Two-Factor Authentication for your account.

To edit your notification settings, you can toggle to the Notifications tab shown below:

You can enable desktop notifications, choose how frequently you receive emails from Ed Discussion or turn this off entirely, and you can toggle various options for the email notifications you would like to receive. 

To receive automatic emails from Ed Discussion directly to your @upenn email address, the notifications should be changed to "Instant" rather than the default option:

Under the Appearance tab, Ed Discussion enables you to change from Light to Dark mode, even providing an option to sync the particular mode with your operating system's settings. In addition, you can change the threaded list style to full (default), compact, or ultra-compact.

Lessons and Workspaces

Ed Discussion has added two additional features that may be leveraged in your course, these are called Lessons and Workspaces. 

• Lessons allow instructors to create step-by-step slides to guide you through a coding lesson.
• Workspaces are Integrated Development Environments (IDE) where students can work on code together to develop programs and test them.

To access Lessons and Workspaces in Ed Discussion, please look along the horizontal navigation bar inside Ed Discussion. If Lessons and Workspaces are enabled for your course you will see an icon that looks like a circle above a book for Lessons and an icon that looks like a command line for Workspaces. (Picture below)

If you are in Lessons or Workspaces and need to navigate back to the discussion board, select the overlapping chat bubble icon in the horizontal navigation to open that course discussion.

Additional Support

For more information on Ed Discussion, you will need to log-in to https://edstem.org/help/

On the help page, you will find information for both instructors and students. We recommend the "Using Ed Discussion" topic as the best place to start. 

If you are already at the Ed Discussion Dashboard, you can click on the person icon found in the upper right-hand side of the screen and then select "Help."

If you have any questions, please email online-learning-help@sas.upenn.edu. 

Please note: The Notification and Profile Settings sections were contributed by Penn's Wharton documentation team.