[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

[stevensons]

This would be a really useful feature, even if it were minimal. In particular, it would be helpful to be able to add hyperlinks to various parts of the course from within an email.

[lmiao22]

We ran our summer pilot semester and just got the survey results in. 74 faculty and 343 students responded the survey. Many students mentioned lacking inbox features. They are hoping to use inbox as emails, but are finding it insufficient, especially without formatting capabilities. 

Please add rich content editor in. 

[jfahs]

Yes, if it is possible to enhance Conversations with implementing the full RTE, then including a tool to link to an external site or items within the course would be significant. It is an essential part of class communication to students who often check their email inbox outside of Canvas.  

[Tasha_Biesinger]

 @stevensons ‌,  @jfahs ‌

I just created a feature idea for this exact thing: https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/10177-course-links-in-conversations  I'm hoping Canvas can work it in if/when they work on adding the RCE to conversation message creation.

[stevensons]

GREAT!!! I just went in and up-voted it.

[steven_marsh]

The Canvas Inbox/Conversations is very deficient, as compared to BlackBoard.  While messaging students in the course, the inability to be able to BOLD important key words and embed URLs and hyperlinks, is a serious and obvious flaw.  Please, please add Rich Text capabilities to the Inbox Communications tool.

I miss BlackBoard !!!

[nick_johnson]

Yes, yes, yes!   Glad to see I'm not the only one that faces weekly struggles with beefing up message formatting in the Inbox in Canvas.  During our training, our institution strongly encouraged (no, insisted) that we use the Inbox in Canvas for messaging out to our students.  I comply, but my regular correspondence with students is embarrassingly flat and basic without even a simple pallet of tools to clarify and enhance our correspondence.  Thank goodness for the dash - which I use instead of the missing bulleted list feature.  But that's about as fancy as I can get in this woefully lacking method of correspondence with our students.

Thanks, and hope to see changes in the near future!

Nicholas Johnson

Adjunct Instructor, Anthropology

Ivy Tech Community College

[thompsli]

I teach math, and many of the Conversations messages I have with students are about...math.

Not having the RCE in Conversations (or having some other way to get LaTeX in there, I suppose) really limits some of my explanations since it's hard to talk about how you should, say, simplify a fraction with a bunch of exponents without proper equation tools. A mess of a bunch of nested () and liberal use of the / and ^ symbols is just not as comprehensible to students. (I "cheat" and use the Unicode symbols for superscripts and subscripts most of the time, but there's no similar workaround for fractions. Also, my students generally aren't going to learn about a bunch of random Unicode symbols and how to get them into their messages before sending me questions, so it only helps with my outgoing messages rather than all of them.)

I often end up having to open up another program entirely to write even short replies and then including those replies as attachments for this reason.

[kperez108]

Yes, please...!!!

Student's are under an immense amout of pressure and educators have to battle to get their attention. If I sent out an email with a block of unformatted text, the student glosses right over it. That wastes my time and theirs. If we can send out an email with bolding, headings, and highlighting - not to mention in-text pictures, I can attract their attention and effectively get out a lot of information in a short amount of time. The fact that canvas does not allow editing in emails seems counter-intuitive to the platform's mission. 

[akinsey]

As a question - does this include the Message Students Who from the Gradebook? That would be a fantastic addition as well!