I use the Collaborations to assign discussion-board style work in an applied course we teach, asking course participants to discuss specific questions coming from the material (course is run asynchronously in that they can get in anytime, but still on a schedule in that discussion questions are due with specific deadlines). Organizing these in a threaded forum style would make it much easier to navigate (and allow a smaller number of collaboration spaces - e.g. one for Discussion Questions with Categories for "Week 1," Week 2," etc. and then sub-categories for Week 1-Question A and the like). Ideally, when logging in, users (both instructor and students) would be able to see how many unread items (here not just posts, but replies and even replies to replies) have been posted and some quicker way to navigate to those.
As it is, may have to re-read an entire collaboration to see if there are any new comments (new posts are obviously easier to see) within the discussion and also have to pay a lot of attention to figuring out what is new since there's no visual identifier for an "unread" item.
As hard as it was for me as the instructor (qualitative grading was called for in the class), it was just as hard for participants who had to randomly look to see if the conversation(s) they were participating in had progressed. This led to wasted time and frankly less engagement since many folks would stop "looking" once they'd made their "required" number of posts rather than being prompted to keep conversing by something indicating they had unread items, had received likes, etc.
It would be helpful to be able to moderate collaboration posts before they are live. A role could be set up as Course Collaborations Moderator where they could approve/deny a post from being published.
Thank you for sharing these ideas. We have considered a variety of ways to improve the collaboration experience such as sorting, filtering, searching, email notifications, etc. We are not focusing on collaboration at the moment but please continue provide great context on how we can better organize and visually identify items.
There is also another idea in the portal for collaboration email notifications - https://ideas.absorblms.com/ideas/LMS-I-118. Please also provide your feedback and votes there. Your contribution and feedback is instrumental to our feature prioritization and development process.
An email to note that a new thread was available or that a comment had been added to the post would be extremley useful. It seems that this collaboraiton createion stopped short of being automated and instead creates more work for a user to check on which results in less engagement. Please finish the whole idea and add an email flag to to notify participants in a collaboration that there is a new post.