Is it possible to prevent students from messaging teachers or teaching assistants?

[robertlbishop]

We need to keep our teaching assistants anonymous. Some users have found that they can find the name of their teaching assistant by sending them a message in the inbox. Is there a way to disable this ability? We tried toggling the Conversations permissions off, but this did not work.

[chadscott]

The only way you can accomplish this would be to turn off the ability for students to message individuals within the course.

If your TA's are enrolled in the course with the TA role (or something built off the TA role), then the students will only be able to message the teacher.

The caveat to this will be if students have messaged the TA previously, those messages will allow them to continue messaging them from that message (but new messages will not be able to be created.)

To get old messages out of the Inbox, you will have to submit a Canvas help ticket and give them the date at which to remove all messages prior to. Be warned, it's everyone and they are not recoverable.

Cheers,
Chad Scott

[robertlbishop]

Thank you for the reply, @chadscott . This part:

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The only way you can accomplish this would be to turn off the ability for students to message individuals within the course.

If your TA's are enrolled in the course with the TA role (or something built off the TA role), then the students will only be able to message the teacher.

The caveat to this will be if students have messaged the TA previously, those messages will allow them to continue messaging them from that message (but new messages will not be able to be created.)

is inconsistent with my testing. I toggled the setting you mentioned in our beta instance and was still able to message TAs using a user account that has never previously sent any messages in the inbox. Is it possible this is linked to a different setting? The additional considerations on this setting say:

Conversations

When disabled, students can still send individual messages to course teachers, course TAs, and students that belong to the same account-level groups.

What am I missing?

[chadscott]

@robertlbishop then that was my brain misremembering the permission 🙂

My only current idea would be to make a custom course role built off the student role, but given TA permissions. I'd definitely suggest testing it out. 

Cheers,
Chad