Communicating with Individual Students

[melissawetherby]

We are currently piloting Canvas, and all of my instructors are looking for a feature that we had grown to rely on in Moodle, and I am having no luck trying to replicate it in Canvas. Hoping someone here might have a suggestion or idea.

For all courses, we would create a One-on-One forum for students to communicate privately with the instructors in the course, this was set-up using groups and groupings in Moodle. The advantage to keeping it in the course forums rather than email or LMS mail features are transparency for the course, and co-instructors both see the same content. In addition, if someone else is taking over a class for any reason, they have access to all student communications for the class without a bunch of forwarded emails or files. This also allowed instructors another way to view their workflow and messages. 

Any searching I do for canvas about communicating with students suggests using the Canvas inbox, however this is tied to the user and not the course so it does not have the same functionality as the One-on-One forum would.

Has anyone else run into this? Any suggestions on how to have private conversations with students that are accessible within the course?

Thanks!

[kona]

 @melissawetherby ​, I'd actually set it up similar to the way it sounds like you did it in Moodle. Create a "Group" (Ex: Student Communications) and then add each student into their own individual group - you can set it up so this is done automatically when you create the group. Then create a discussion in Canvas and under settings make sure and check the "This is a group discussion" box and select the "Student Communications" group. This way Instructors can flip back and forth between the individual student discussions and students can only see the discussion between themselves and the Instructor.

Here are some guides that should help with this:

• Groups in Canvas
• How do I create a Group Discussion for my course?

Hope this helps!

[snugent]

There are a couple of ways this could be handled in Canvas. I think each option would have pros and cons so each teacher would have to decide what works for them.

A discussion assigned to the individual student - All graded assignments including discussions can be assigned to an individual student. When you assign assignments to individual students you can set a different due date and availability period if desired. This will also create a gradebook column for each discussion which might be undesirable for the teacher. Unfortunately with ungraded discussions you will not have the ability to assign to individual students.

An Assignment assigned to the individual student - This option is similar to the discussion idea but the student would submit a text entry. The disadvantage is that students only see the last submission.  

What do Differentiated Assignments look like in Canvas?

How do I assign an Assignment to an individual student or course section?

Use a Group Set - On the people page you can create group sets. In a group set you could create a group for each student. The advantage or disadvantage depending on how you look at it would be several groups for the instructor view and manage. Groups can be attached to graded assignments or discussions.

How do I create a new Group Set?

How do I manually assign students to Groups?

How do I add Assignment Groups in my course?