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I have been voting and commenting on this issue for years, but I have also been bugging every Canvas account representative I've had about this relentlessly.  One thing that makes it frustrating for us is that when we signed up for Canvas in 2012, one of the reasons we signed up for it was that students could email anyone in the school, and of course teachers could as well.  Then they took that away and made it so that teachers could only email one class at a time.  Our teachers have many courses, so they may have to copy & paste a message 20 or 30 times -- it's an incredible waste of time. What I've been told in response to this not having been tackled yet is that it's not just votes that affect what changes are made in the Canvas system; it also has to do with technical issues.  For example, sometimes multiple changes (from idea voting) can be done fairly easily with one code re-write, whereas another one would require extensive changes in other parts of the system (a kind of domino effect) that would make what seems to be a simple change not so simple.  This is an answer as to how such decisions are generally made, not this particular issue. All this to say, voting is an important part of the process but not the only factor in deciding.  I am glad to see this is finally ranking close to the top 10. Our staff has been desperately waiting for years for Canvas to address this; they can't do it soon enough! ... View more

And still, after a meeting evaluating Q3 2019 items to work on, they STILL consider it not worthy of working on.  It seems they really don't understand how unnecessarily time-consuming this is. ... View more

For sure.  This is BY FAR the biggest complaint I get about Canvas from teachers at my school.  Almost two years ago, @Renee Carney said it was put on "Product Radar."  The product radar page says, "An idea may stay in Product Radar indefinitely."  How do we get it out of the dormant radar and back into focus that this is important to us?? ... View more

Cross-listing is for multiple sections of the same course, is it not?  Our teachers have 10 to 15 entirely different courses, so they have to make a lot of separate messages. ... View more

I would need Creation Date sort far more than a Publish Date sort. But what I most want is our preferred sort to be sticky -- I hate having to change the sort every time I open the page.  It wasn't a problem on the old system because it was alphabetical and made sense, but the new default order makes no sense to me. ... View more

Our school is 100% online and has a completely open calendar, no beginning or end.  We've been using Canvas for over four years, and we've been using "Default Term" for all of our courses. ... View more

There are a couple of students at our school that I imagine might be interested in participating in something like BugCrowd.  Could you provide information on how students might join BugCrowd in order to work on Canvas? ... View more

We use Edgenuity curriculum with Canvas.  All of our course content is in Edgenuity.  We chose Canvas because we felt its communication features (conversations, discussions, chat, conference room) were superior to Edgenuity's LMS.  Also, we wanted the ability to add our own classes, which we have done from time to time, so that was another reason for choosing Canvas even though Edgenuity is supposed to be a complete LMS and curriculum in itself.  Students log into Canvas, and access their Edgenuity courses through Canvas. ... View more

We are a 100% online school -- everyone works out of their homes, so we don't have "school email accounts" for students.  Besides, one of the selling points of Canvas Conversations is that students can decide how to receive communications from teachers or administration, based on how they communicate -- they can work on messages within Canvas, or have them forwarded to their phones as text messages, or forwarded to email.  A lot of students don't use email much.  (Heck, most of my friends in their 20s & 30s don't use email for communication.  If I ask for an email address, they say, "I don't use email.")  So I totally agree with your statement, Joan Falter: "The fact that [Instructure says] the inbox is not intended to replace email does not change the fact that it has replaced email for a lot of communication." ... View more

Before this new version of Conversations came out a couple of years ago, Conversations was convenient and easy to use, and one of the reasons we chose Canvas as our platform.  All of that drastically changed when the new Conversations came out and suddenly crippled our use of it. Before the new Conversations, we could do the following: 1) Any student, teacher, or staff member could send a message to any other student, teacher or staff member in the school.  Other school LMS offerings we looked at only allowed students to message others students in their same course.  The fact that Canvas allowed students to message anyone in the school was a major reason we chose Canvas to begin with.  Then they took it away. 2) Because anyone could send a message to anyone, teachers could freely send a message to whichever students they wanted, whichever combination of students, or all of their students.  Now teachers are forced to create multiple messages if students are in more than one course.  Some of our teachers have 10 or 15 courses, so this means a lot of duplicated effort just to communicate to all their students.  For example, to inform their students that they will be out of the office for a particular period of time requires sending a separate message to every one of their many courses.  With the new Conversations, they can't even send messages to other teachers or the administration! (without separate workarounds) 3) We like to send out congratulations messages to students when they have reached a milestone, such as completing a grade level.  This was easy to do with the old Conversations, and other teachers could chime in to offer congratulations and encouragement to the students.  This ability was destroyed with the new Conversations. We have been forced to create workarounds since the new Conversations was created, but they have at best been workarounds to obstacles -- in other words, not convenient.  And some things we have not been able to work around. For #1 above, we created a separate course called Homeroom, where we put all students and teachers.  With this method, now all students can message and chat with each other, and teachers can message any student, teacher, or administrator.  However, this requires maintaining another course, so it's less convenient.  Before, if someone was in Canvas, they could email someone else, and it didn't require additional maintenance of a course. For #3 above, we now send out congratulations messages from Homeroom.  However, with the new 100-person limit for group messages, we've had to split those up so that a teacher doesn't have hundreds of sent messages in their box for each congratulations message.  This means that not everyone can see any responses to the congratulations message.  Before, everyone could see.  Now only the people in that <100 person group can see. We haven't been able to find a practical workaround for #2 above -- teachers have no easy way of sending a message to all their students at once or their choice of combinations of students.  And judging by the number of votes on this thread, many others are frustrated by this limitation also. The problems that have arisen since Canvas crippled Conversations come up in multiple threads, but since different people have different issues with the crippled Conversations, they don't always get the attention needed.  I have gathered a few examples here -- all of these examples are reflective of things that we used to be able to do in Conversations before the new version came out. It seems sad that we have to go through feature requests and voting processes to get back functionality that we used to have.  And even with 383 votes, we still can't get back what we need. ... View more

When the new Conversations came along and suddenly prevented teachers and/or students from messaging anyone outside their own course, our CSM suggested we could set up a Homeroom course to bring back the functionality lost that we had with the old Conversations.  We put all teachers and students in Homeroom, and this way anyone in the school can message anyone else in the school.  Also, students start discussions in Homeroom on any topic they want, so it's a place for them to interact. We send out congratulations messages when students finish a course or grade level.  With Homeroom we could send them out to everyone again like we used to be able to, but a limitation of the new system was that messages going out to more than 100 students were automatically sent as individual messages, which creates a nightmare in the Sent box.  So we created two groups in Homeroom -- one for high school students, and one for middle school students and teachers.  (We're a small school, so each of those groups comes to less than 100.)  That way teachers can send out their congratulations messages and only have two messages in their Sent box -- one for each group. ... View more

#2 and #8 are most important for us, in that order. ... View more