Guides for Students Sending E-mail Using Canvas Inbox?

[holmant]

Hi

I know how teachers/faculty send e-mails, but I have questions about students ability to send e-mails.

• Are there guides for STUDENTS on sending e-mails? 
• Is there any difference in how teachers/faculty send e-mail and how students send e-mails? 
• Can the students e-mail each other/all students using Canvas Inbox or can they only mail students within their assigned groups?

THANK YOU FOR ALL YOUR HELP!!!!!!!!!!!  (yes, still learning!)

T

[James · Accepted solution]

 @holmant  

There is a Canvas Student Guide that has a whole section on the Inbox.

The Inbox and conversations exist at the global level and not tied to any particular course. The role of instructor or student is specific to a course. That means that the inbox works the same regardless of whether you are an instructor or student. Who you can send messages to is related to courses you're in, but this is the same for faculty and students. As an instructor, I could not message someone not in my class.

Even if you share a course with someone, there can be a difference in who you can send emails to. There is a course level permission that the local Canvas Administrator controls called "Conversations - send messages to entire class" and "Conversations - send messages to individual course members."

When the entire class one is enabled, it allows a user to send a message to "All in [course name]" or "All in [course group]."  We have that disabled for students, but enabled for teachers. By default, it is disabled for students and observers. On reason we left it disabled is to keep students from spamming the entire class.

We have the individual members ones enabled for all roles. When enabled, it allows students to message other students in the course. When this is disabled, students cannot email other students in the class, but can email the teacher, TAs, and students who belong to the same account-level groups. According to the documentation, they are unable to send individual messages to other students in the same course-level groups (translation: if they are in group, they could send messages to the entire group but not to individual members of the group). By default, this is disabled only for observer roles.

Explanations of the permissions are in the Canvas Course Role Permissions PDF file.