Students rely on electronic communication from their instructor for a variety of reasons: for answers to questions about the course structure and content, to receive feedback on assignments/assessments, for updates to the course, and for motivation.
Canvas has multiple options for communicating with your students, and you should be familiar with all of them. You will want to know how to use the Canvas inbox, the “Announcements” tool, the Speedgrader, and the “Message Students who…” feature in the gradebook.
Feedback is a vital part of the instructor’s role. Through timely, personal, encouraging, specific feedback, you have a unique opportunity to positively influence students.
Canvas makes it easy to send targeted messages to specific groups of students
Open External Link , which is a huge time-saver in a large course and increases your ability to connect with students on an individual level. From a gradebook column dropdown menu, click the button to “Message Students Who”. You can then choose to send a message to students who haven’t submitted or who scored above or below a certain threshold. The messages go out as a blind carbon copy, so students aren’t aware of who else was included in the message. This is a great way of connecting with your students and showing that you care about how they are doing without having to write lots of individual messages. Try sending messages to students who exceeded your expectations in addition to students who seem to be struggling.
Canvas - Get Started
The following list of pages will guide you through getting started with this tool. The current page is listed in bold.
