I similarly support improvement in student/student communication tools to better support collaboration and interaction.

When we first migrated to Canvas, one of the features that we appreciated was the strong suite of communication options available to students and faculty, and I favor Canvas continuing to improve those communication options so that teachers can reach students wherever they are are, on whatever device they use, and communicate whatever content needs to be communicated. I support this idea, because instructor presence is such a powerful component of online instruction, and has been proven to be a key indicator in student persistence and ultimate success. Canvas Inbox or their school email account.Īdd functionality that allows attachments to come through with an email reply from designated external email accounts or forwarded to their accounts fully intact! If a student emails me a question via Canvas Inbox and it is forwarded to my standard school email account (we use Outlook Mail) then I should be able to answer that student from my regular school account and attach a file and have the student receive it where ever they are reading their email.

Did you know that while Canvas Inbox allows you to forward your email to an external account that if you answer the email from the external account and add an attachment, that will not show up in Canvas Inbox? Seems that file attachments in this situation go into a unknown land never to be seen! So if Canvas allows you to forward inbox messages to your external account (in my case my official college email account) then why not have access to full features of standard email? What sense does it make to have the forwarding happen if replies can't have full functionality?įor an instructor, this adds an unnecessary layer of complexity to what should be a simple activity.

I hate the new hotmail focused inbox