Can evaluators enrolled as instructors see student e-mails?

[JamesBinney]

I just had a peer evaluation done and on the returned evaluation form, the peer reviewer stated that they could not see the student e-mails. The peer reviewer was added to the class as an instructor. Is this true that they could not see the e-mails?

[nwilson7 · Accepted solution]

@JamesBinney By default, anyone with the "Teacher" role can see student email addresses.  This can be turned off by your institution.  Our "Login ID" is the students' email address so our faculty can click on the "People" button in Canvas and then next to each student, they see their email.  If you use something else for the login ID then the faculty member may need to go one step further and click on the student's name to see all of that info.

Hope this helps!

-Nick

[JamesBinney]

Dear MWilson: Thank you so much for your reply. In my evaluation, they gave the evaluator admittance as an "instructor" to my class to observe my class. But in the evaluation, they were not able to make any comments about e-mail replies that I had with students. Quick communication with students via the canvas e-mail system is a crucial part of this evaluation, and good teachers respond quickly to their e-mails. So why were they unable to view these ? Do you think that it was because of privacy issues and FERPA that they were not able to see these e-mails ? Thank you so much !!!

[chriscas]

Hi @JamesBinney,

I think there might have been come confusion about viewing email *addresses* and viewing Canvas Conversation (inbox) messages (which is what I think you're actually referring to here).  As far as I know, Canvas Conversation content is really only visible to the senders and recipients of the messages.  There would definitely be privacy concerns if all teachers in a course could read each other's conversations.  There are some ways Canvas administrators can see the conversations, though I don't currently even know a way to do this easily in bulk.  All that being said, if you made comments on individual assignment submissions, those be available to all people with the teacher role.

Hope this helps!

-Chris

[nwilson7]

@JamesBinney  I apologize, I interpreted student emails as email addresses which by your second comment is not what you meant.  I will echo what @chriscas said.  Emails are between users, not between the course and a student.  So, one instructor sending an email to the student and the student replying works the same way as any other email system where it is between those two people.  There is not a way to email on behalf of the course so that any instructor could see the replies.  I would follow chriscas' suggestion of using comments for this so all instructors could see the back and forth.

Sorry for the confusion on my part!

-Nick