How to Block Students from Inboxing Each other in a Teacher Account Not Associated with an organization

[johnstuart_j]

Hi there,

I understand this question has been asked many times on here, but I thought I would reword it, and promise to respond with my end results.

I am an elementary teacher who has been using Canvas for some time now. I have created a Canvas account, and started several online classes with my homeroom. When I first started using Canvas, I noticed that my students were privately emailing each other, which is extremely unethical in elementary grades. So I was forced to ask each student to hand over their passwords and make an effort to login periodically to address their online behaviour.

I have since learned that some organizations have admin privileges which can block "Send messages to individual course members." My question is: how does a regular teacher account seek admin privileges when they are not associated with an organization? If this is not possible, what does Canvas offer for students who are under 18 years of age?

[scottdennis · Accepted solution]

Hi Jonathan,

For clarification I assume you are referring to Canvas Free for Teacher (FFT) because that is where you are authenticating into the community from.  For any who are not aware; Instructure provides a no-cost option for teachers to create courses in FFT for free and invite people to participate as students via emailed invitations. FFT is a fully featured deployment of Canvas and people can use it for free indefinitely as long as they log into their classes at least once every 365 days.

Canvas as a software project has the capacity to allow all users who have some association with each other by way of course enrollment to send direct inbox messages back and forth.  If you share a course enrollment with another user, you can send and receive either direct or group messages back and forth.  Due to local needs and policies some institutions choose to disable inbox messaging in their own paid instances of Canvas.  This is an all or nothing proposition.   

Warning; skip this paragraph unless you want an overly long technical discussion. Just for anyone interesting in the technical background of this question there is a reason why it would be very difficult (not impossible but very difficult) to implement a course specific messaging policy.  Messaging lives outside the course structure in Canvas.  As a user you don't have a course inbox. You have one inbox across the system.  Other than system administrators, users in Canvas do not have system level roles.  You have a role associated with each course.  One person might be a teacher in one course, a student in another, etc.  So, in order to make it so teachers could decide whether to allow students to message each other, Canvas would need to check the role of every sender and every receiver in every course and the policies in those courses to match up whether this student can send but that student can't receive, except that they can because another teacher has a different policy...  

With regards to FFT we have chosen not to disable inbox messaging across the system because we believe it serves the needs of the most people.  We understand this decision does not make your personal situation easier and especially now we (I) feel for educators facing unprecedented challenges.  But we also remain firm in believing we should deploy a platform optimized for the good of the many.