Dear Christoph,
Thanks for the pointers to your “Discourse for Online Education Communities”. Interesting to see the educational disciplines that are currently using Discourse. It seems that computing and coding schools predominate; I thus encourage your group to proceed with caution because the nature of discourse in the coding/computing field is very different from that in online courses in the rest of the university. Applied sciences have their own epistemology, and that is why ventures such as Coursera, Udacity, edX are able to profit most easily (low hanging fruit…altho Udacity did make some pivotal improvements). Other disciplines such as social sciences, pure sciences, learning sciences, medical education, dentistry, and fields of law, etc. approach discourse in a very different way. Do not lose sight of how discourse is used to augment learning in different fields or you will lose attraction to to those very large fields which are currently seeking online presence.
One other comment to consider wrt online education. You noted that Canvas might get muddled if Discourse was introduced. That possibly should be the last of your concerns. Canvas is a leaking ship: the model of education that they support and enable is a cookie cutter of the mid-twentieth century classroom. The first 10-15 years of online education used only computer conferencing, because we want to highlight discussion and not memorization and obedience by the learners. Many people today (including me) believe that the “invention” of the LMS has been a huge set back to online education. It was premature, and by providing professors with the primitive didactic teaching tools such as quizzes, lecture (videos, lecture notes, slide shows), that the very worst of 20th century didactic education was transported online and now holds north american universities in captivity. An LMS made it too easy to just upload existing “stuff” and teach in the old factory style. Discourse (and by that I mean discussion, debate, knowledge building) is where learning really takes place…quizzes, grade books are just add-ons that are mistaken as educational. Discourse, the software and company, should take heed and seek to provide true learning environments and forget Canvas. Unless Canvas et al, advance with their forum software they are DOA. Discourse will kill it. Cheers! PS: I like the notion of connecting annotation software with discourse software. That is heading in the right direction, imho.