Turning off Chat feature

[JenniferOstrows]

I have read the article about disabling the course chat in Canvas LMS.  I teach in a k-6 school and would like to disable the course chat for my courses.  How do I disable the course chat feature? 

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @JenniferOstrows,

Assuming you mean the default Chat tool that Canvas cloud has available on the left hand course menu, you can follow the How do I manage Course Navigation links? - Instructure Community (canvaslms.com) guide to disable the Chat item.  If this doesn't work for you, please let us know!

-Chris

[TrishaMeyer1]

Good morning!

@JenniferOstrows , were you able to disable this feature successfully?

@chriscas I just got a call from a principal because a teacher disabled the Chat feature on the menu, but students are still accessing Chat via the URL. I'm not sure what that means - what URL could they be using? Is it possible they have something cached? Do you have any insights?

Thank you!

[chriscas]

Hi @TrishaMeyer1,

This has been brought up as an issue with the way Canvas handles launches for external tools like Chat in some other discussions I've been a part of with other Canvas admins around the country.  Basically, hiding the menu items only makes them invisible from students, but because the tool ID is the same, students who have multiple courses can go into another course with a tool enabled, grab the path to that tool(like courses/zzzzz/external_tools/yyyy), then just modify the course id to whatever other course they want, and Canvas will happily launch the tool for that course.

This seems to just be the way Canvas has been architected from the beginning, so I don't know how feasible any kind of fix really is without potentially breaking all kinds of intended functionality.  It was suggested to have a way to not only hide, but totally disable the external tool for the course, which makes sense to me but some other admins were quick to start discussing drawbacks of that approach.

If the entire school does not want to use chat, it could definitely be removed from the entire Canvas instance and that would leave no way for students to use this workaround.

-Chris

[TrishaMeyer1]

Hmm, this is an elementary site using Canvas for Elementary, so the students shouldn't have any other courses unless the teacher has multiple Subjects. I'll have to see if that is the case - maybe the teacher needs to disable the tool in ALL subjects and the Homeroom.

These kids! How did they know how to do that?!

Thank you, @chriscas , for your quick reply!