The Questions & Answers (Q&A) dashboard is designed to help instructors monitor and respond to student questions with ease and efficiency.
Accessing the Instructor Q&A Dashboard
To access the instructor Q&A Dashboard, follow the steps below:
- Navigate to the Course Page (steps on how to can be viewed here).
- Click Communications on the left-hand side and select Q&A.
Here are Some Highlights:
- Review and respond to questions across all courses using either the single or double pane view.
- Filter for unanswered or unread questions. This allows instructors to get back to students faster, keeping students more engaged in the course.
- Mark a response as the “Top Answer” to indicate the top response to other students, or “Helpful” to signal a student question from which other students might benefit.
- Access the lecture where the student asked the question and view timestamps of when a question was asked and responded to. All of this provides additional context to students’ questions to help instructors respond efficiently.
Managing the Q&A Dashboard
Marking Your Questions as "Read"
The message should automatically be marked as read when any of the below events happen:
- Instructor puts their cursor in the reply text field
- Instructor clicks anywhere in the message (to see all replies, open the discussion post, go to the student’s profile, mark as helpful etc.)
- The instructor can manually mark the question as read or unread by either clicking on the green dot.
The Difference Between Unread and Unanswered
Unread indicates that you, as the instructor, has not yet marked the question as "read". Unanswered means that no response has been marked as "Top Answer". Only the instructor and original poster can mark responses as "Top Answer".
The Difference Between Marking a Response as "Helpful" and Marking a Response as "Top Answer"
Instructors can only select one response as the "Top Answer", but if there are a number of helpful responses, you can mark those as "Helpful" to indicate to students that there are other responses they can refer to. Any student or the instructor can mark an answer as "Helpful".
Sorting by Oldest to Newest
When an instructor sorts questions about oldest to newest, the question time will be determined by the most recent response time.
Getting Context for the Question
If the student asked a question within a particular lecture, the instructors will see a link to the lecture right underneath the course title.
