Teacher-to-Student Communication, pt. 1: Messaging

The first 2 weeks of the semester are finally over and you’ve set your courses in motion. Your first few homework assignments have been assigned and your students have a deadline to meet within the next 2 days. On your way home from a Saturday afternoon at the beach, you suddenly realize big changes need to be made to the requirements for Monday’s assignment. You decide to notify your students of the change – but how? Methods of communication are plentiful, but how do you decide which is best? Which one gets a message to your students ASAP and guarantees that they’ll see it, even if they’re only jumping online for a few minutes?

The real answer is complicated. Over the next two posts, we’ll look at two ways to contact your students. Because certain users prefer one method over the other, we need to set up our accounts to function equally across different platforms and devices that, in the end, do the same thing: notify students of an update. There really isn’t one perfect solution for guaranteeing that all of your students read and respond to your messages immediately. However, you can have your Canvas account and courses set up so that message notifications are delivered to students quickly and efficiently.

Let’s talk about something basic:

Sending a Mass Email Message

One quick way to get a message to everyone in your course is to simply send them all an email. Click the buttons below to learn about a couple of ways to do this.

Canvas Inbox Using the Inbox tool within Canvas, you can create and reply to conversations between yourself and users enrolled in your courses. When composing a message, you choose a specific course that you want to communicate with and can then view recipients by sections, student groups, or roles. Here’s a document from Canvas on how to manage and create conversations within the system. Take note that the Canvas Inbox tool is not a full-fledged emailing platform. It can handle basic user-to-user and user-to-group messaging very well, but when you begin attaching larger documents and other files, or depend on it to handle complex messages that include HTML, it may not perform as expected. For things like this, you might want to seek an alternate route by way of an actual emailing system.

Regular Email As Teacher, the People page can be used to filter and search through a list of all available users in your course. You are able to view everyone’s email address and role, and you can click on their names for other information. If your goal is to send larger documents and formatted messages to groups of students, you could copy these addresses and create a contact group for your course using your favorite email platform (Outlook, Office365, OwlApps, etc.). Messaging students this way will establish a feature-rich conversation between you and your class in an environment you are already comfortable with. You can attain a list of emails in the form of a spreadsheet from your gradebook. Click here to learn how!

We’ll talk about another option – avoiding email/direct messaging – in the next post. For now, practice using the Conversations tool (Canvas Inbox) and set up a contact group in your email client for the students in your course. You may want to send out a test message to get used to how these systems really work. Below is a video from Canvas that provides a general overview of the Conversations tool. If you have any questions or would like to schedule a time to visit one of our experts, submit a Help Desk ticket or check out our schedule of events. Lastly, to stay up to date with new features, events, and documentation, don’t forget to subscribe to our blog with your FAU email address at the bottom of the page.