[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

[themidiman]

I'd like to vote up on this, but I can't. The vote count shows 0 and there's nothing obvious about how to add a vote. I got here by way of my Activity stream in the Beta Community Site.

[themidiman]

Maybe the inability to vote up could be linked to the fact that it's an imported idea from the old community site??

[seth]

Hi Jeff--

Good feedback. Thanks! We're introducing a new process for feature ideas

that will have ideas run through a series of stages. In the first stage,

"New," ideas will be visible, but not vote-on-able. At the beginning of

each month, we'll release a fresh batch of "New" ideas into the second

stage, "Open for Voting." They'll stay in that stage until they either

accrue a net-30 upvotes or until 90 days passes without them getting 30

votes. They'll then move to another stage in the process. The process is

described a bit here:

https://instructure.jiveon.com/community/ideas/feature-ideas. We'll need to

explain it better for folks so they don't run into the same question you

had.

Thanks!

Seth

[Beth_Young]

This feature would be very, very useful. If you implement it, please include a strikethrough button, as we have here in this forum.

[edit]

I thought maybe it would help for me to give some examples of when strikethrough would be useful. When I'm teaching, I'm often addressing two concepts that strikethrough helps explain:

* Concision. It is easier to convey opportunities for concision when you can visually cross-out and replace wordy phrases.

* Analysis. I often advise students who are trying to analyze the syntactic structure of a sentence that they should first cross-out all the adverbials and prepositional phrases. It's much easier to demonstrate that process with strikethrough.

[rpetrina]

I think that sometimes faculty use Announcements to send information to students specifically because Conversations does not allow for rich text editing. Having the ability to use the Content Selector to incorporate links to course material would be wonderful.

[800215513]

A couple times while writing a message I have found rich content features would have helped make my messages easier to read.

Some features in particular that would have been useful are:

• Bold certain text
• Underline text
• Create bullets

[James_Kocher_UF]

It doesn't look like some of the formatting stays in the notification email that is sent out. I know many students who read their announcements that way without checking on the course site itself!

I also wish that when you sent an announcement, embedded content like images or videos would also show up in the email the students receive.  They miss the great memes I put in a lot of my announcements 

[rpetrina]

I was not aware that some of the formatting was lost. Do you have specific examples? I also wonder if the formatting loss is specific to the type of account where the student receives announcement messages, because I know that things can be truncated if they are not going to the institutional email account.

[James_Kocher_UF]

When I tested it out, things like font size changes were removed, but bold and other decorations.

This was received at my gmail.

The one I got at my institution email was completely sanitized for my protection 

I didn't try it with bullets, etc though. Don't know if they stick or not.

[Stef_retired]

 @rpetrina ​ and  @James_Kocher_UF ​, I've been told that notifications of announcements are sent in two different formats, depending on whether the recipient is the creator or the recipient of the announcement. I had reported this formatting discrepancy in a ticket, and here's the guidance I received from Canvas Support:

You are indicating that announcements are appearing differently for students and instructors. When I reviewed this I found that this is actually acting as intended. When an announcement is sent, the "created by me" copy that is sent to the instructor is in a fairly basic format. This allows them to have access to all of the information, for example it shows the location of their hyperlinks so that they can review and make sure that those links are going to the appropriate location. The students will get the "pretty" version that is adjusted according to the viewer format instead of the editor format.