Catch unanswered student questions in Canvas discussions

Every weekday at 8am, check the discussion boards across my active Canvas courses and tell me which student questions are still waiting on a reply from me or my teaching team.

Use Canvas List Courses to find my active courses. For each course, use List Discussion Topics and skip anything that is an announcement. For every topic with recent activity, use Get Full Topic View to read the thread as a full nested reply tree, so you can see every reply sitting under every post. If a thread is too large to pull in one go, fall back to List Topic Entries and then List Entry Replies for the entries that matter.

Use List Enrollments in a Course to work out who the teachers and TAs are in each course, so you can reliably tell an instructor reply apart from a student reply rather than guessing from names.

Then use judgement to pick out the posts that are genuinely student questions, as opposed to general discussion, a required weekly post, or a thank-you note. A question counts as still waiting when no instructor or TA has replied to it for more than 24 hours, ignoring weekends, so a Friday afternoon question is not overdue on Monday morning. A reply from a classmate does not count as answered.

When a classmate has answered incorrectly or only partially, flag that above simple silence. A wrong answer is actively spreading to the rest of the class, which makes it more urgent than a question nobody has touched yet. Say plainly what the classmate got wrong so I can see why it was escalated.

Post one ranked digest to my teaching team Slack channel using Send a Message. Order it by how long each question has waited and how many students are asking the same thing, grouping duplicates of the same underlying question into a single item and noting how many students asked it. For each item include the course name, a link to the thread, the question itself, and a suggested reply I can review.

Draft those replies but never post them back to students automatically. Do not use Canvas Post a Reply or Post an Entry under any circumstances. Every drafted answer belongs in the digest for me to review and send myself, so no student ever receives an unreviewed reply.

When nothing is outstanding, say so in a single line instead of sending an empty digest.