Having Thoughtful, Inclusive Discussions on Canvas with Kialo

Just about any teacher will tell you — and the research agrees — that class discussions are some of the best activities for teaching critical thinking, building communication skills, and involving students in their own learning. Yet we also know that class discussions aren’t easy for every student. For each student who leans into a spirited discussion, there is often one who limits their contributions to “I agree,” and another unwilling to contribute at all. The result is that class discussions, for all their well-documented benefits, often suffer from limited engagement and participation.

So, how can you facilitate more thoughtful, inclusive discussions? Enter Kialo, the 100% free tool designed to do just that, all within Canvas LMS. 

Enhance Critical Thinking 

Kialo is an online discussion tool that enables students to map out their arguments in an intuitive pro/con format. Starting from a central thesis, students can support or refute by adding pros and cons. Where it gets truly interesting, though, is that each pro and con can have its own set of pros and cons, and so on. This prompts students to deepen their reasoning by adding further and further supporting arguments (more pros), or they can challenge reasoning at any step by adding counterarguments (more cons).

As students add these pros and cons, they appear as a branching map of the discussion, allowing students to see how their ideas connect and how their arguments are logically developed or refuted! In this way, Kialo offers a simple way to have complex discussions — as can be seen in our demo discussion. 
 

Improve Quality and Quantity of Discussion Contributions

Whether you teach in a good old-fashioned classroom or find yourself on the digital frontiers of e-learning, Kialo can improve both the quality and quantity of contributions in your discussions.

Live discussions often suffer from the unavoidable fact that only one student can speak at a time. As an online platform, where contributions are simultaneous, everyone can participate in a Kialo discussion at once, with no need to call on students one by one.

Plus, as a text-based tool, Kialo enables everyone to participate without the anxiety of public speaking, or of peer judgment in general. Kialo even offers an Anonymous Discussion mode, where students can adopt colorful animal avatars that keep their identities hidden from peers (though never teachers!). Altogether, this makes Kialo discussions significantly more inclusive than a traditional oral discussion, with teachers reporting 3–5x more participation on Kialo!

Kialo can also make your discussions more cohesive. In an in-person classroom, students may have to sit and wait to finally share their response to a point that was made ten minutes ago, which can lead to a disjointed conversation. And in traditional discussion boards, responses can appear many scrolls away from the point that they’re responding to. Yet on Kialo, pros and cons appear directly below the claim they are addressing, with no limit to how many times the discussion can branch out or deepen. This makes discussions much easier to follow, and in turn, allows students to contribute more thoughtfully.

And for the teachers, Kialo offers an extensive toolbox to make life a little easier. The Tasks feature lets educators assign specific goals for their students, such as writing a certain number of claims, responding to a certain number of classmates’ claims, or adding a certain number of sources. Our Topic Library offers nearly 600 ready-to-go discussion resources on a wide variety of academic and not-so-academic topics. Meanwhile, our built-in Grading and Feedback feature makes grading class discussions easier and more reliable than ever! And that’s just the tip of the iceberg — Kialo has many more features to save you time and to help improve your practice.

Increase Interactivity in Canvas with Kialo Discussions 

Kialo’s format and deep feature set lend it to a variety of use cases.  Kialo offers a clear and structured alternative to Canvas discussions, as its argument mapping format makes group discussions easier to follow while fostering critical thinking skills in students. It is also an excellent tool for asynchronous learning, allowing classroom discussions to continue seamlessly between in-person sessions. You can use Kialo to diversify your activities on Canvas LMS through: 

• Whole-class discussions: Invite your whole class to a Kialo discussion and watch everyone get involved!
• Small-group discussions: Each group works in their own copy of a template discussion that you control — and it’s totally compatible with Canvas Groups, which are carried over automatically. 
• Flipped learning: Have students prep for a lesson by having an exploratory discussion, and then build on it in class!
• Essay planning: Give each student their own Kialo discussion and direct them to use it as an outlining tool. There they can easily play around with the structure of their ideas before committing them to paper.
• Assessments: Assign students individual Kialo discussions to have them explore a topic in depth, and then give them grades and feedback in Kialo which can be sent back to Canvas LMS. Students can reckon with content at the same level of complexity as an academic essay, but without the trappings of academic writing, providing a pedagogically sound but more approachable assessment format to your students.

Amplify Asynchronous Discussion Impact with Kialo + Canvas 

As a platform that measures its success in impact rather than dollars, we’re always looking for more ways to spread the word and amplify our reach. That’s why we were delighted to become a Canvas partner. As one of the world’s leading LMSs, empowering educators everywhere with a suite of helpful tools, Canvas LMS is the perfect home for Kialo. Our partnership gives Canvas users a powerful discussion tool at zero cost, and it lets Kialo help more teachers have thoughtful, inclusive discussions in their classes.

Plus, our integration with Canvas LMS is about more than just Single Sign On! After using Kialo’s Grading and Feedback tool, export those grades into your Canvas Gradebook with a single click. Or use Kialo’s Small Group Mode with the Groups you already have set up in Canvas LMS. We handle the admin so you can focus on what’s important: facilitating thoughtful, inclusive discussions!

Want to know more about Kialo and Canvas?

If you’d like to learn more about Kialo and how it works with Canvas LMS to enhance your class discussions, join us for our webinar on March 11, 2025! There, you can see Kialo in action for yourself and see how seamlessly it works in Canvas LMS.

In the meantime, you can learn more about Kialo on your own through our website, find us on Instructure’s Edtech Collective Marketplace, or go right ahead and install the Kialo integration for Canvas to begin discussing. It’s completely free, so you’ve got nothing to lose!