Communicating in Canvas: Announcements & Inbox
Canvas provides several ways to communicate with your students. We'll outline two of them: Announcements and Inbox. The major difference between these two tools is intent and audience. A course announcement is a course-wide message. A message in the Inbox may be private between an instructor and a student or group of students or a message between students.
Course Announcements
Announcements can be used provide students with news, updates, and reminders. Students receive email copies of announcements in their campus email. This is based on their notification preferences; by default, they receive the message immediately, but they can opt for less frequent notifications.
The video below provides a basic overview of the Announcements tool.
306 - Announcements Overview from Instructure Canvas Community on Vimeo.
Considerations for Using Announcements
- By default, students receive an immediate email copy of a course announcement. However, faculty do not automatically receive copies of announcements they have created. If you wish to receive email copies of your own announcements (e.g., as reassurance that the announcement went out), you will need to edit your notification preferences.
- Announcements can be scheduled in advance or posted immediately. Delaying the release even by a little bit gives you an opportunity to proofread (and revise if needed) before students receive it.
- If multiple sections are loaded to your Canvas site, you can post an announcement to just selected sections if necessary.
- Announcements are also available in Canvas Groups. You can post an announcement to just one group, and group members can post announcements to each other.
- When you copy an entire Canvas site from one semester to the next, the announcements are included. You will need to go through them and delete any that are no longer needed or edit the release date for those you wish to re-use. Be sure to also edit out any information that was only relevant to the previous class!
- The Rich Content Editor and Content Selector are available to you when you create an announcement. Use these to format the text of your posts or to link to the items you reference; for example, if you are reminding students that an assignment is due, you can link to that assignment.
Learn More
Canvas Inbox
The Inbox allows Canvas users to send messages to one another within Canvas.
By default, messages sent within Canvas are also sent to the user’s campus email. But students can change their default notification settings to receive them less often—or not at all.
Ways you can use the Inbox:
- Send information or updates to an individual student, a section, or a group.
- Record a media comment (audio or video) to send to an individual student, section, or group.
- Send file attachments to an individual student, a section, or a group.
- Use the “Message Students Who…” feature in the Gradebook to contact students who have not submitted an assessment, who scored less than a given grade, or who scored more than a given grade.
Learn More
Adapted from “Communication in Canvas” in Start Here 102: Best Practices in Online instruction, licensed CC BY 4.0 by Grace Seo, University of Missouri.