[Inbox] Add rich-content editor to Conversations

[seth]

As a user, I would like to be able to use the rich-content editor to compose messages in the Conversations inbox. This would enable me to create Conversations that are on par, formatting- and content-wise, with Announcements. (Students seem to read Conversations messages more diligently than Announcements.)

transferred from the old Community

Originally posted by: Mia Nolan

Special thanks for contributions by: Stefanie Sanders

[lramert]

I teach Professional Writing, and one of our earliest assignments is how to write a professional email. Things like formatting matter. After hitting "send" in Inbox, all of the formatting is lost. So, if you had blank lines between paragraphs, they dissappear and there is not even a space between the sentences that ended and started those separate paragraphs. It looks a mess, basically.

I have been complaining about this for a few years (since my institution switched to Canvas). We were never told that Inbox is not analagous to email, and I was surprised when I was told this. Students definitely use it in lieu of email. This may be partly because we switched from Blackboard, and you CAN email from inside Blackboard. Both students and I like to have a "one-stop shop": I don't want to have to sign in to many places. (At my institution, I would have to sign into a THIRD place to send an actual email to a bulk list of my class.)

I suppose I could explain to students that Inbox is not email and they can't use Inbox for the email assignment, but some will not get the message and use it anyway. And I think that is fair because *I* want Inbox to be email, too! (I already have an entire document in Week 1 of my online class explaining that they must/how to go to Settings and set things up how they want them, but I am pretty sure 99% never go into settings and change anything and then wonder why they aren't getting information. I don't have time, and it's not really my job to teach them how to use Canvas correctly. It would be nice if things were more intuitive, like this Inbox/email thing.)

[scottdennis]

Hi Lynn (and others commenting here),

I in no way want to discount or dismiss the frustrations you are are experiencing due to an absence of rich formatting options in the Canvas Inbox.  However I did want to mention that making a quick, informal, not-email communication option within Canvas was an original design choice made by the creators of Canvas based on feedback they received in their original product validation tour.  That being said, it was a design decision made ten years ago that is not immutable today.  I just wanted to clarify that it was a conscious design choice originally versus an unconscious omission.

[jennifer_pusate]

From an accessibility point of view, the lack of the rich content editor in the conversations portion of Canvas presents a huge barrier for students with a variety of learning challenges:  students with visual impairments, dyslexia and other text-based disabilities, English language learners, etc.  Canvas has set itself apart from other LMS's because of their willingness to make changes that benefit all learners.  Keep it up!  Make the change.

[DeletedUser]

Electing to make a "quick, informal, non-email" communication option may have been a conscious choice, but I'm surprised that the implementation was so functionally inconsistent, hobbled and awkward (ie. poor).

Everything about this so-called "design" flies in the face of even mediocre examples of text composition software systems and interfaces that existed ten or even twenty years ago.

My fear - as I mentioned here last fall - is that maintenance headaches grow the longer that you hang onto bad software, and the implication of this is that the longer that you guys choose not to fix this, the less likely it is that you're ever going to.

For over four years now, you've been collecting complaints on this page (and maybe others, too) from your customers who live and breathe robust communication.

Please unify all text composition experiences and make them good ones.

[jhunnicutt]

our school wants us to strictly message our students through Canvas so their parent (learning coach) is copied on the message.  We would like the ability to add text enhancements (bold, italic, etc), pictures within the text, links to course pages/modules within the text.

[sdjones1]

This voting is a waste of precious time.  If it makes sense to professional educators, then it should be done.

[sdjones1]

The most common answer when googling how to do something in CANVAs.

You can't, but here is the workaround.

[sdjones1]

This would be a great tool for doing that, but ......

I am getting more English as a Second language students in my Orientation class.  I would really be nit to be able to post pictures and diagrams to show them what I am trying to say.

[mwolfenstein]

Hyperlinks is what brought me here this morning. I'm sending a Zoom meeting invitation to my students, I don't want to make it an announcement because it's just a reminder for something I already announced, the link Zoom generates is really long, and my students are faculty training to teach online so modeling best practices is really important for me and as we all know descriptive links are an essential practice for accessibility.

[mwolfenstein]

I totally get the original justification a decade ago for this choice. It made sense then when Instructure was the scrappy upstart in the LMS marketplace, and in a time and context where young people predominantly used SMS for quick communication. Twitter was 140 characters because it needed to be text friendly, not everyone had smartphones, video chat wasn't even a thing...I mean, MySpace had only lost social network dominance to facebook a year prior.

In those 10 years Instructure has become the dominant force in LMS's. Blackboard Learn owns fractionally more of the market in 2019 than Canvas according to the LMS market share analytics I was able to find online, and if the trend continues those numbers will likely have flipped in a year. I've also heard (but can't seem to find supporting data) that messaging apps have eclipsed SMS for short form communications. User expectations have changed with the times, like they do.

What's really unfortunate is that this is now a 5 year old conversation, and like so many of the feature requests appearing in these forums it continues to remain open for voting with no action or communication from Instructure beyond, "has been considered and will not impact." At the very least, I think that we as a user community deserve updated explanations for why features are or aren't being considered. If something is not planned for development that a lot of people are asking for and have been for a long time like https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/7532-allow-folders-in-pages?sr=search&searchId=cd27c2a3-ccad-4..., give us a little more information about your thinking and if you don't plan on developing it take it down from this space and provide a clear explanation for why you can't or won't.

I recognize that those of us participating in these discussions are by and large your super users. With that in mind, I don't expect Instructure to implement the features being requested. I actually expect more than that. You're dominating the marketplace. I expect you to take the ideas your users are asking for, determine what the actual user needs are instead of the idea being expressed, and find the way to satisfy those needs using smart approaches to development that minimize time and risk to get essential features out. Switching LMS's has a huge organizational cost, but if Canvas continues to lack really fundamental features users have come to expect in an LMS like robust communication tools and methods for organizing and managing content, someone else will make it evident that they can do the things Canvas isn't.