Canvas communication tools

Announcements

Use Canvas Announcements to communicate to your entire cohort, or if you have used Canvas Groups to group your students, use Announcements within the Group to make contact with these specific groups of students. Go to the Group homepage first before posting the announcement.

To communicate with individual students as needed, use the Inbox functionality in Canvas (see People tab and click the mail icon). You can also use a context card to contact a student directly.

When an announcement is made, Canvas sends students a notification, according to the students’ personal notification preferences. The options listed below are also available for publishing announcements:

• Select whether your announcements go to all people in your course (staff and students) or just to relevant sections, such as a room change for one class only.
• Create and schedule announcements for specific times during your course, such as upcoming deadline reminders.
• Change the default course settings to disallow student replies to announcements. Student replies will be visible to all course users.

Note:

• Savvy students within the group will also be able to post announcements, but they will only be posted to the group.
• Each individual student controls their own notification setting preferences, so some students may miss important information if they have turned notifications off. Make sure students have set their Canvas notifications settings to accept Announcements and Conversations.
• Ask students to ensure their University email account is forwarding to their personal email address (for those who prefer to use personal email only).

See also: If you want to communicate with a group of students or an individual student, see Canvas Inbox guides.

Delayed posting

Students may experience information overload, especially if they are receiving announcements at all times of the day and night.

While teaching staff often can only deal with these in the evenings/nights, it is good to reinforce that we are not expecting students to be studying 24/7, and that we acknowledge they have other pressures on their time.

Use the Canvas’ functionality of ‘delay posting’:

• Tick Delay posting found in ‘Options’ immediately above the SAVE button.
• This allows you to write announcements at any time and send it to students at a later date/time (for example, write it on a Friday night but delay sending it until Monday morning).

Video: Canvas tutorial – Announcements

Chat

You can interact with your students in real time using Canvas’ Chat feature.

• Chat content is visible to all enrolled students.
• Any user enrolled in the course can participate.
• Currently there is no upper limit for the number of users in a course chat. However, a large number of users may affect chat performance.
• A Canvas user must be actively viewing the chat tool to appear in the chat list.
• Consider posting Chat hours in the course calendar to let students know when you are available.
• Chat comments cannot be deleted.

See also: To communicate with a group of students or an individual student, see Canvas Inbox.

Video: Canvas tutorial – Chat