Course Comments

This article goes over how to add and manage comments within course lessons.

Overview

On Teachable, you can turn on comments for any specific lesson(s) within your school course(s). Comments on course lessons help school owners foster student engagement and interact directly with students.

Enable lesson comments

Comments can be enabled or disabled for each individual lesson within your course. To enable comments on a course lesson:

1. Select a course from your Courses menu.
2. Within the course, click the Curriculum menu.
3. Click into a specific course lesson.
4. Under Lesson settings, toggle on Student comments. (If you do not see the toggle, make sure to add some content to your lesson first).

Comment settings

Comment settings can be adjusted in the Settings > General > Courses > Comments settings section of your school admin.

You can enable the following settings:

• Enable Comment Moderation - When enabled, any comment that is made on a lesson by a student must be approved by the school owner before it will appear in the lesson comments.
• Enable comment attachments - When enabled, allow students and instructors the ability to upload an image file to their comments.
• Allow multi-level threading of responses - When enabled, allow students to reply to specific comments. Multi-level threading keeps comments organized and allows students to easily engage in conversation with other students or instructors in the course.

Viewing comments

You can view and manage comments across all courses in your school from the Site > Comments menu. Alternatively, you can view and manage comments for a specific course from the Comments tab of that specific course.

To view all comments click the All Messages tab. Alternatively, you can view all comments that are awaiting moderation by clicking the Pending Approval tab. (The Pending Approval tab is only visible if you enable comment moderation as a setting).

Comments are listed in a table that includes the following details:

• Comment - A brief preview of the comment text.
• From - The name of the user who left the comment.
• Course Name - The name of the course that contains the comment.
• Lesson - The name of the lesson that contains the comment.
• Last Updated - The date the comment was made.

New course comments will appear in bold with a blue dot to the left of the comment. Read comments will appear without a dot and the text will not be in bold. You can change the status of a comment individually, or as a bulk action, by clicking the box beside the comment or the select all box at the top of the row. When marking the comment as either read or new, use the Mark as Read or Mark as New buttons in the top right corner of the admin.

If you click on a specific comment, it will expand the full comment thread into a separate flyout window. If the comment is new, clicking it will automatically change the status to read. From the comment flyout window, you can:

• Approve pending comments
• Reply to comments
• Mark individual comments as new or read
• Copy direct links to comments
• Click the name of the course or lesson to navigate to the page where the comment was made
• View parent comments (comments above the selected comment), sibling comments (comments on the same level as the selected comment) and child comments(replies to the selected comment) from the same comment thread. The selected comment will be highlighted in a green border.

Comment moderation

If you toggle on the Enable Comment Moderation setting, any comments made will not appear in the lesson until they are approved. When a student leaves a comment on a lesson with comment moderation enabled, this message will appear:

To approve or reject a comment that is awaiting moderation, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to the Comments tab of a specific course to view comments specific to that course. Alternatively, navigate to Site > Comments to view comments from all courses.
2. To view all comments that are awaiting moderation, click the Pending approval tab.
3. Click a specific comment.
4. In the expanded comment flyout window, click Approve or Deny. If you approve, the comment will be publicly visible in the course lesson. If you deny, the comment will still be visible in your comment admin menu, but will not be visible by any students on the lesson page.

Comment attachments

If the Enable comment attachments setting is enabled, any user in the course can add an image attachment (2GB or smaller) to their comment(s).

To add an attachment to a comment, click the Add File icon before posting the comment:

Then, select a file by clicking Choose File. Click the Post Comment button to publish the comment and attachment in the lesson.

Reply to comments

If the Allow multi-level threading of responses setting is enabled, users can reply directly to specific comments to create a comment thread.

Students and school owners/course authors can reply to comments directly from the course lesson page by clicking the Reply icon and posting their comment:

Alternatively, school owners/course authors can reply to comments from their school admin. To do so:

1. Navigate to the Comments tab of a specific course to view comments specific to that course. Alternatively, navigate to Site > Comments to view comments from all courses.
2. Click a specific comment.
3. In the expanded comment flyout window, click the Reply button.
4. Type your comment in the reply box, then click the Reply icon to send.

Link to comments

To link to a specific comment or comment thread:

1. Navigate to the Comments tab of a specific course to view comments specific to that course. Alternatively, navigate to Site > Comments to view comments from all courses.
2. Click a specific comment.
3. In the expanded comment flyout window, click the Link button on the specific comment from your school admin. (This will automatically open the comment in a new tab.)
4. To get a URL for that specific comment, copy the URL from the top of your browser bar.

The Link button is also available from the lesson page view.

Delete comments

To delete a comment:

1. Navigate to the lesson page where the comment is located.
2. Click the X icon on the comment you want to delete.

If you delete a comment that has threaded comments beneath it, there will be a “This comment has been removed” in its place:

Deleted comments will not be visible in course lessons. However, they will still be visible in your school admin with a Denied tag:

Notifications

As a school owner, you can set preferences for email notifications you and your students receive for lesson comments.

From the Settings > Notifications menu, you can set preferences for comment notifications you will receive as a school owner:

When you receive an email notification about a new comment, you will see the student’s name, the course name, the lesson title, date and time (listed in UTC), and a link to respond directly to the comment in your school’s admin:

From the Email > Settings menu, you can set preferences for notifications your students will receive for lesson comments:

Students can choose to opt in or out of comment notifications themselves from their profile settings.