How to see message history between students and other teachers?

paul14
Community Participant

Hello community.

We're having a lot of difficulty with one thing in particular in our use of Canvas, since switching from our old system:

  • We take a team-based approach to facilitating learning and assessments with our students
  • Therefore at different times, students interact with different teachers in the same course.
  • This means it is very very important for one teacher to be able to see the inbox/messages/conversations between a student and other teachers. This way they can easily get up to speed on how the student is progressing and any other issues.

Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions? Is there a report we're missing? A setting we've missed somewhere? A plugin that will handle this?

Things we've tried/considered:

  • When students message multiple facilitators their question from the help menu, we manually coordinate or CC each other in to replies. Sometimes two or more facilitators have replied to the student's same question.
    • The interactions report which only seems to show interactions between the student and the teacher viewing the report (not other teacher's who've had interactions).
    • The faculty journal seems to only log outgoing messages from within the inbox, if you tick the box. But the tick box doesn't always show up in all messaging areas within the system.
    • Adding another user/email to the system which we try to remember to include in all messages, which has its own inbox that we can use to log all the messages. It's messy, sometimes we forget, and difficult to search up the latest messages. And like the faculty journal we're still stuck with outgoing messages only.

    Our other system kept everything in a lovely searchable timeline, so it was easy to see the latest interactions, submissions, comments, we could log calls there, etc.