It’s great to have someone systematically assess discourse for use in education. You might also be interested in this topic about discourse in academia more broadly:
and this blog post (if you have not already seen it):
It’s important to emphasize the “discussion tools” part here. In other words: discourse clearly can’t replace a complete LMS. And the problem is that if you are already using an LMS (for whatever reason, but most likely because your school is using it) adding discourse into the picture just makes everything so much more complicated, both for students and for teachers. This raises the question of integrations or “integrability”. What would it take to integrate discourse into Canvas so that it could be used instead of Canvas’ native discussion module?
There is an excellent (and perhaps better) alternative solution, though, which already integrates into Canvas:
I love hyposthesis and I think it might be more suitable a tool for online discussion because it turns the entire WWW into material for students to annotate and discuss. However (!), hypothesis’ main mission is annotation, not discussion (though the two are very closely linked and hypothesis does a decent job at facilitating discussion). So I’m dreaming of a better integration between hypothesis and discourse, in which hypothesis would be could at web annotations and discourse would take over once the discussion gets bigger.