Discussion boards are a staple of online courses, but the default experience in most LMS platforms has real limitations. Students copy each other's answers. Instructor posts get buried. There is no way to require students to commit to their own thinking before reading what everyone else wrote. And when instructors want anonymous feedback, they often have to go outside the LMS entirely.

Atomic Discussions solves these problems. It is an LTI-integrated discussion tool, built by Atomic Jolt, that embeds directly into Brightspace course pages. It keeps the familiar threaded discussion format but adds the controls instructors actually need to run productive conversations.

Key Capabilities

• Threaded replies with rich content editor (bold, italics, headings, lists, image uploads)
• Gated posting (students must post before seeing others' replies)
• Anonymous discussion mode (Student # identifiers)
• Instructor/grader comment highlighting
• Likes (configurable: all students or graders only) with sort-by-likes option
• Section filtering for multi-section courses
• Student comment activity monitoring
• Export discussion data for reporting
• Notification support for discussion activity
• Secure student authentication via OAuth