Message Students Directly From People Tab

[skoogi]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

        

  Idea open for vote Wed. September 7, 2016 - Wed. December 7, 2016  Learn more about voting...

I would like to be able to message students from their "people" page.  This would allow me to more quickly and efficiently interact with the student in a variety of ways.

  Comments from Instructure

For more information, please read through the Canvas Production Release Notes (2017-01-28) 

[scottdennis]

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this idea so far.  I just added it to the September cohort which will open for vote tomorrow.  Please come back to vote!

[Renee_Carney]

This idea has moved to the next stage and will be open for voting among the Canvas Community, from Wed. September 7, 2016 - Wed. December 7, 2016.

Check out this doc for additional details about how the voting process works!

[amelidonis]

I would love it if we could send a message directly to the students phone (text or messenger).

[iedwards]

This sounds like an excellent idea! Thanks, Scott!

[skoogi]

It would seem to me that anything that can speed up the communication process, while not impeding other Canvas functions is a good idea and to the advantage of instructors and students. 

[cfrood]

I would also appreciate the ability to message a student outside of a specific context. 

[kschneider25]

I'm always in-favor of less clicks and consistency.

Add it to the gear regardless if you have profiles enabled or not.

[khaley]

Great idea.  A time saver.

[cward]

We're in the process of building a solution, that although won't solve the problem as described here, will solve this problem. Unfortunately I can't share details or timelines, but know we have something in the works around this.

[James]

I looked at this last week. It seems that the link you need to do this is provided from the User Details page.

It looks something like:

GET /conversations?context_id=course_54321&user_id=123456&user_name=Tom%20Brown

I think I got as far as parsing the information to generate the link and then testing it, but I hadn't applied it to the People page.

But it could be added to the People page. The hangup is that the user page is dynamically loaded, so you would have to reapply that to each student as more are loaded. That's not impossible, I did something similar (adding whenever new users are added) with my Canvas Roster Sorter script (see Course Roster Enhancements​)

But it's nice to know that Canvas is working on something so I don't need to write something. On the other hand, I could write it and then say it became obsolete by something Canvas did -- which is what I eventually hope would happen to all my scripts.