Course announcements, reminders about upcoming deadlines, following up about something mentioned in lecture—an instructor’s ability to communicate with students is an important part of the teaching process. Luckily, TXST Canvas helps faculty accomplish this by providing multiple avenues of communication. I wanted to highlight some of these communication features.
Announcements
The Announcements feature in Canvas is great for sending timely information to your class, such as changes in deadlines, policies of the class or for projects. It’s also great for answering general questions and comments. Once you create and post an announcement, it will be listed in the Announcements tool, where students can view all announcements made for the course by the date sent. Announcements can also include attachments, and you can choose whether or not to enable things like comments or likes. Announcements also can only be created by users designated as the “Teacher” role for the course.
Whether or not the announcement is emailed to a student’s Texas State email will depend upon each student’s notification preferences (see the notifications section below for more info). The default notification preference is set to send an email immediately, unless the student changes it.
Inbox / Messages
The Inbox feature, which is also known as Messages or Conversations, works a lot like an email tool in Canvas. In fact, if you are familiar with Email in TRACS, this more or less the Canvas equivalent, except it is a Canvas wide feature rather than a course specific one. Inbox can be accessed from the Canvas global navigation menu (maroon bar on the left side of the screen if you’re viewing on a desktop/laptop). Anyone in Canvas—both students and instructors, have access to the Inbox feature. Students can only be messaged in Inbox once they have an active enrollment in a course you are teaching and the Course Site is published.
Inbox allows you to send a message to all users in a course, users in a specific role, individuals, or users in a group, and will also send a copy to a person’s Texas State email address. This is super handy because you can reply directly from Outlook also, meaning you and the recipient(s) can converse entirely through your Texas State email if you want (although the message will also appear in your Canvas Inbox if you prefer communicating there).
You can send one single message to multiple people or choose to have that message go out to them individually. Messages can include attachments or recorded media. They are only sent to the recipients, unlike announcements, which are displayed to everyone enrolled in that course. Once a course concludes, you can no longer send messages to all users, but can still respond to users with the Teacher, TA, or Designer roles in concluded courses.
Notifications
Canvas includes several default notification preferences for users which can be manually enabled or disabled. Notification preferences allow users to choose what reminders they want to receive and how often. In total, there are 27 individual notification preferences that range from “Course Activities” notifications like due date, files, and grading, to “Discussion” preferences like when a new post is created.
Notifications are an account-based feature, so each user controls their own preferences. They also apply globally across all courses. For this reason, I recommend encouraging your students not to modify the settings from the default, or to be very aware of any changes they make so they don’t miss out on any important reminders, deadlines, or critical course information.
You might also consider adding verbiage to your syllabus regarding specific tool use, so that students are aware of the need to have their notification preferences enabled. For example, you could say, “This course will use announcements and conversations to send out important information.”
Discussions
Discussions allow for interactive communication between two or more people in a Course Site. If you ever used Forums in TRACS, this is the Canvas equivalent tool. Instructors can create as many topics as they would like for students to respond. The responses are also created using the Canvas Rich Content Editor, meaning they can include formatted text, links, and multi-media.
There are two types of discussions you can create: focused and threaded. Focused discussions include only one response and one layer of comment nesting. They’re great for things like having students answer a single question, clarifying course policies, and sharing insights about a single reading. Threaded discussions on the other hand are more interactive and must be enabled on a topic. They include infinite layers of response nesting and are great for things like having students post and answer multiple questions, sharing and iterating on ideas from other students, and asking multiple questions of a single discussion leader. Grading Discussions is also a breeze with Speedgrader.
Calendar
Canvas has a fantastic Calendar feature, which I think both faculty and students will find useful to keep track of important events, assignments, and deadlines. While it isn’t a traditional sounding communication method, such as one with the ability to directly communicate between users, it will serve as a very useful tool for communicating important information for your course to your students. Calendar can display events and assignments for all of a user’s Course and Project Sites. Within Calendar, each Canvas site’s individual calendar can be toggled to display or hide it from view, so you can view for only one course at a time or all of them at once.
By default, Calendar will show a “month” view, but has the ability to show in a “week” view or an “agenda” list. Each person also has their own private calendar and can add personal events to display. The Calendar can be accessed from the global navigation/maroon bar menu.
More information
Canvas has a variety of great communication methods for instructors and students. Here are some helpful resources to help you with communicating in Canvas:
- The IT Assistance Center’s Canvas support page
- Canvas guide on Announcements
- Canvas guide on Inbox/Messages
- Canvas guide on Notifications
- Canvas guide on Calendar
- Canvas guide on Discussions
Steffanie Agnew is the digital marketing strategist in the IT Marketing and Communications office.
