Last year I used the Discussion option regularly for daily class participation. I would put the assigned reading for that class in the title, guiding questions in the description, and then students would enter their responses to the discussion individually.

Unfortunately, I only started doing this midway through the year (I used Padlet for the discussion posts for the first half of the year).

So my first-half-of-the-year daily participation assignments are all Assignments and my second-half-of-the-year daily participation assignments are all Discussions. (They are in the same grading category, and I am using the same grading categories this year.)

When I import the assignments from the first half of the year, it also imports the guiding questions which were in the description, but there's no way for me to change this into a discussion which students can post on because it was created last year as an assignment.

The fact that discussions can be incorporated into the gradebook so seamlessly suggests to me that it shouldn't be impossible to change an assignment center entry from an assignment to a discussion.

As it is, I'm not looking forward to manually recreating all of my discussions from the first half of the year, manually copying and pasting guiding questions from the description of last year's assignment into this year's discussion. It would be great if this step could either be added to as a bulk-edit option in either the import wizard or in the assignment center ('make discussion'). But even making us change the assignments to discussions individually after importing would be better than recreating all of these discussions manually.