Now live: Featured Questions and Q&A search improvements

Abbie

Hi everyone,

Recently, we announced that we'd introduced a new tool, Featured Questions, to help you highlight the most important information in your course Q&A. We gave you a few weeks to start to populate this new section of your course communication.

We're excited to share that your Featured Questions are now visible to students in your courses! If you haven't had a chance to add any yet, no problem. You can manage your Featured Questions at any time in the Communications tab of your instructor dashboard.

As part of our efforts to make Q&A more manageable, we also heard that the search functionality within Q&A needed improvements. We recently released several upgrades to make search more useful for you and your students. Some highlights:

• Search results are now automatically sorted by relevance; you can also choose to sort by recency or upvotes
• Searches now execute as you type, so even partial matches return quick results
• Searches now consider the body and title of each question, as well as the name of the student who asked it

We hope these help you save time and continue to deliver a great student experience as you support your students through Q&A. Let us know what you think below!

CarlosDeLeon

The improvements to the search feature are really welcome!

However, as far as I can tell, they are not really executed as we type, but only until we press enter (or click the search icon).

Also, it seems that it only considers the parts of the body written by students, and doesn't find things written by the instructor (based on a few tests I did). Can you confirm this point?

ba0708

Awesome! 👌

Another thing I'd love to see is suggestions for existing questions when asking a new one. That would hopefully eliminate many duplicate questions. Stackoverflow has been doing it for many years, and it works extremely well. 🙂

MariaG

Hi @CarlosDeLeon
,

It should search as you type, not wait for you to hit the enter/search button. We’re seeing it work that way on our side and don’t have other reports of that not working as expected. There’s a little bit of lag as the search catches up to what you’ve typed most recently. For example, in the attached screenshot, the user didn’t hit enter or search; the results populated after about a second of not typing. Is it not working that way for you? The search should apply to both questions and answers, whether it’s a student or an instructor who typed them. On that side, there does seem to be a known issue with answers not indexing, which we’ll work to get resolved as soon as possible.

CarlosDeLeon

@MariaG
I was trying it on the instructor side of the Q&A, but I see that you are talking about the student side.

And, so far, I haven't been able to find questions by searching for words I, as the instructor, wrote to answer a question, but again, speaking of the instructor side of the Q&A.

MariaG

Hi @CarlosDeLeon
,

At the moment, these changes are focused on deflecting new student questions, so they’re only live on the student side. We can definitely share the feedback that you’d like to see the same upgrades applied on the instructor side.