Perhaps you have noticed the little mail icon labeled Inbox on the blue menu bar on the left hand bar of your screen and though “just what I need – ANOTHER inbox”. This brief post will outline a few ways in which this option (called Conversations in Canvas-speak) might offer you some benefits.
To begin, here’s a video introduction of how Conversations work in Canvas.
Benefits of using the Canvas Inbox:
- All course related messages are grouped together (not intermingled with other emails)
- You can filter your messages by course to view conversations only related to that course
- Students (and faculty) can still set their notifications to receive email messages when they receive messages in their Canvas inbox if they find that helpful
Things to consider:
- Using right click (or option+click) functionality you can open the Canvas mailbox in another tab to keep this feature handy while you are doing other work in Canvas
- Once a course has concluded the messaging function in Canvas can no longer be used for that course.