Teacher Control of Inbox Messaging Permissions

[AshleyPorter1]

Hello! As a teacher in a large district, my students have found they can inbox message students from any section -- our librarian has all the students in her canvas, so they have access to students in the whole school.  Therefore they are arranging meeting times/locations via canvas messages.  Is there any ability that a teacher -- not the canvas administrator -- can change these settings?  I know the canvas administrator can, but in our district they like this feature in the high school level, but in the middle school level we do not want this feature turned on. 

[mzimmerman · Accepted solution]

Hi @AshleyPorter1 

I suspect that within the library course, all the students may actually be under a single section.  If that is the case, then limiting section privileges will not really help.

The ability to send messages via the Inbox is controlled by a couple of role permissions called "Conversations - send messages to entire class" and "Conversations - send messages to individual course members".

Here's a screenshot with more details below, with what they look like and how they work.

In that situation, I think I would have the administrator create a customized version of the "Student" role, maybe called "Library Student", which has the "Conversations...." permissions disabled, and enroll the students in the library course under that custom role....

[JessicaDeanSVC]

Hi there @AshleyPorter1! Canvas does let teachers restrict messaging between sections in their coursesw. However, it is something that can only be done when adding someone to the course OR manually for each individual user who is already in the course. Depending on how many students are in that course, the instructor could be looking at hours and hours of manually making that change for each student 😒

• How do I limit a user to only interact with other users in the same course section?

[paul_fynn]

Hi @AshleyPorter1 

Although @JessicaDeanSVC is correct in identifying that you need to set the permissions when the students are enrolled in the sections, this is something that ought to be configurable as part of the provisioning process if your institution is running enrolments off the Student Information System.

University of Indiana has a good breakdown of the issues here : https://kb.iu.edu/d/aqns

If you go to the Canvas Guide to SIS / CSV imports here https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Admin-Guide/How-do-I-format-CSV-text-files-for-uploading-SIS-data... 

This describes the following .

• limit_section_privileges: This is how to designate that the enrollment will allow the user to only see and interact with users enrolled in the section given by course_section_id. This field defaults to false. Limiting students to interact by section only affects Collaborations, Chat, People, and Conversations. When enrolling instructors and TAs, section limitations allow those users to grade students in their same section(s). Discussion topics and Pages are not affected by section limitations and can be viewed by any student. These feature areas could be restricted by creating content in course groups.

If you need more support with this, then you may need to ask your IT Support Team, or refer to your Canvas Success Manager.

Rereading your post, I suspect that the issue with the library site is that students are being added to a single section - in this case you may need to look at the site configuration, or explore ways to use the csv approach above - alternatively change the library course settings to, for example, hide the People menu link, or change the student permissions.

Good luck !

[JessicaDeanSVC]

Great point, @paul_fynn! The teacher could work with their Canvas admin to pull an enrollment report, then do an SIS import with that data to change the limit_section_privileges for all the students currently enrolled, yeah? 

[mzimmerman · Accepted solution]

Hi @AshleyPorter1 

I suspect that within the library course, all the students may actually be under a single section.  If that is the case, then limiting section privileges will not really help.

The ability to send messages via the Inbox is controlled by a couple of role permissions called "Conversations - send messages to entire class" and "Conversations - send messages to individual course members".

Here's a screenshot with more details below, with what they look like and how they work.

In that situation, I think I would have the administrator create a customized version of the "Student" role, maybe called "Library Student", which has the "Conversations...." permissions disabled, and enroll the students in the library course under that custom role....

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @AshleyPorter1, I agree with the approach @mzimmerman gave here.  Alternately, the library course could be placed into a different subaccount from other courses, and the permissions for students in that subaccount could be altered to deny conversations.  Two different but similar approaches to accomplish the same thing.

At the end of the day though, I think the answer to your question around whether teachers have any direct control over this is a "no".

-Chris