Canvas - Instructor-to-Learner Communication

Canvas has 3 native instructor-to-learner communication tools outside of its discussion forums:

• Announcements

• Conferences

• Inbox

Canvas’ focus is primarily on mentoring individual learners through instructor-paced classroom teaching. This means it focuses heavily on communication, as the higher-touch courses get, the more they typically need the ability to communicate with learners.

Announcements

By default, Announcements in Canvas appear as a forum-like experience that is almost identical to the standard Canvas discussion forums. 

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Announcements have additional features and functionality, however, such as the “external feeds” button, which allows external RSS feeds to be pulled into Canvas announcements. In turn, Canvas announcements can be shared as RSS feeds that can be pulled into other locations, primarily intended for students with RSS readers (but technically usable for anything). Learners can comment on and discuss announcements as they would in any forum discussion, unless the thread is locked by staff.

Creating announcements uses a simple WYSIWYG editor, and has options for:

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• Delay posting - this allows the instructor to set a date and time for the announcement to be posted

• Allow users to comment - This allows or prohibits learners from commenting, disabled by default

• Users must post before seeing replies - When commenting is enabled, it requires learners to comment first, allowing staff to use announcements as mini engagement activities that stop learners from simply copying answers from prior comments, which is neat.

• Enable podcast feed - This enables the announcement going out via RSS.

• Allow liking - allows learners to like announcements and comments on announcements.

What’s also worth noting is that they’re now rolling out a redesign for announcements that must be enabled by administrators. 

This version seems to forego the RSS feed element (presumably it was not commonly used, which I can imagine is true given Canvas is used predominantly by the K-12 market, and no 6th grader is using an RSS feed reader), and streamlines the announcements to minimise the forum-like structure so that announcements appear without having to click into threads. Liking seems to be restricted to comments, rather than the announcement itself (which learners are just expected to like by default, I suppose), and the navigation for announcements has been slimmed down and modified for simplicity.

As this new version is still in a feedback cycle alongside their discussion redesign (which seems poorly received, to say the least), there are a few posts about it that are worth noting for ourselves:

• Some institutions have been asking for the ability to draft announcements for 13 years, and the new design still doesn’t deliver on that capability

• The same thread surfaces an issue with copying announcements between courses, which is something that instructors want to be able to do, as some announcements are the same on each run of the course.

This feature satisfies the following needs for communication:

• One-to-All

Conferences

Conferences are actually not a native tool to Canvas, technically, but I learned this partway through researching, and it is an interesting integration, so I’m not going to cut them. 

Conferences are actually a video conferencing integration with BigBlueButton by default, and seem to support other tools if enabled. Canvas provides a distinct UI for conference scheduling, and simplified tools aimed towards instructors for scheduling sessions.

The conference session can be added to the course calendar, and has additional options for which members of the course are invited and permitted, as well as preconfiguring settings for the session in BigBlueButton:

Canvas advertise conferences as being useful for the following examples in their documentation:

• Connect with your students for online office hours or study sessions designed to help them prepare for a test.

• Connect with your colleagues for professional development webinars.

• Practice presenting online. Students can set up practice presentations in their student Groups.

• Invite special guests to your classroom by adding them as a student or observer to your course.

• Broadcast a live event or lecture to the students that can't be onsite.

• Record your conferences so students can view them at a later date. Recordings are automatically deleted 7 days after the conference ends.

They are essentially designed to integrate live video events and webinars into the course experience in a way that is as close to seamless as possible for learners.

This feature satisfies the following needs for communication:

• One-to-All

• One-to-Some (learners can be invited by group)

• One-to-One (learners can be invited individually)

Inbox

The inbox is Canvas’ messaging tool. It provides a bidirectional email-like interface for communicating with learners. The inbox is shared per user across all courses they are in, so it serves as an account-level messaging system, rather than being per course. The inbox can be used by learners to message each other, as well as an instructor-to-learner communication tool.

Along the top are a series of filters and search areas:

• “Course” filters messages and other searches based on the selected course, for example filtering for all messages from learners in a specific course

• The second box labelled “Inbox” allows the messages to be filtered by status:

  • Inbox (all messages, weirdly)

  • Unread

  • Starred (you can star messages to find them later)

  • Sent

  • Archived

  • Submission comments (feedback on submitted assignments, which comes into the user’s inbox)

• The third search box allows you to search for messages from a specific user

When users want to message each other, they must first select a context for that communication, which means that users who do not share a connection such as a course or section cannot message one another. This also means that staff cannot message learners who they do not manage or have any other connection with, unless they are administrators. This may at least in part be a child safeguarding feature, given Canvas’ K-12 context.

Users that can be messaged can be found in the address book, a directory of all users that are within the scope of the current user, via groups, courses and other allowed contexts:

While custom roles exist in Canvas, they cannot be found or messaged through the address book, which seems like an annoying limitation of the system.

Up to 100 learners can be messaged as a group, beyond that point it sends an individual message to each learner, which means it appears as if they are being contacted individually, which is an option available to staff when sending messages to multiple learners:

This feature satisfies the following needs for communication:

• One-to-All

• One-to-Some (learner groups and sections can be messaged as a group)

• One-to-One (learners can be individually messaged)