The Questions & Answers (Q&A) dashboard is designed to help instructors monitor and respond to student questions with ease and efficiency.
Please note: the Q&A is not available in free courses.
Accessing the instructor Q&A dashboard
To access the instructor Q&A Dashboard, follow the steps below:
- Navigate to the Course Page (review instructions).
- 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 select a question and answer as a Featured Question.
- 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
Set your availability
If you wish to provide students with a timeframe for when they can expect to receive a response to their question, or inform them that you’re out of the office, you can do so by setting an availability status. The availability status can be set on an individual course basis or for all of your courses.
You can access the Availability page by clicking Availability on the left-hand side of the course management page.
Please note: the instructor availability status can only be set by the primary instructor on the account.
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 also manually mark the question as read or unread by clicking on the dot at the top of the question.
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".
Sorting by oldest to newest
When an instructor sorts questions by oldest to newest, the question time will be determined by the most recent response time.
Upvote a question or answer, or sort by most upvoted
You can recommend questions or answers you believe others should see by clicking on the upvote (arrow) icon.
You can also find and prioritize questions that have received upvotes from your students, by using the Most upvoted filter.
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.
