Introduction

Throughout the term, you probably have a need to communicate with your entire class, to convey information to specific groups of students, and to engage in conversation with individual students at various points.

On this page, you will find solutions to address these questions:

How can I communicate efficiently with my entire class vs. with individual students?
How do I communicate with specific groups of students in my class?

How can I communicate efficiently with my entire class vs. with individual students?

The Canvas Inbox can be difficult to manage, especially when sending messages to more than one student at a time. Using announcements for whole-class communication and the Inbox for individual student communication is one of the best ways to manage the volume of student communication in your course.

Announcements: Use for Whole Class Communication

We recommend using the Announcements feature in Canvas for any message intended for your entire class. Besides being a more streamlined way to communicate to large groups of students, announcements also stay visible in the Announcements tab of your course unless you delete them, which means when new students are added to your course part way through the term, they will be able to see all of the announcements you have sent to the class since the course began (which isn't possible with the Inbox or email).

To learn more information about creating announcements, visit the Communicate with Students page in the Canvas Learning Path.

Inbox: Use for Individual Student Communication

We recommend using the Canvas Inbox to send individual email messages to your students. Sending messages to groups of students via the Inbox has been known to cause issues since students have the ability to "reply all" to these messages, depending on the settings you choose for the message. This can lead to high-volume responses and confusing message threads that are difficult to manage.

To learn more information about how to use and manage the Inbox visit the Communicate with Students page in the Canvas Learning Path.

How do I communicate with specific groups of students in my class?

If you need to communicate to groups of students in your course but don't want to use the Inbox tool for group messages, there are other options to consider including sending messages from the Gradebook or sending announcements within student groups:

Gradebook

The Canvas Gradebook has a feature called "message students who" which allows you to message groups of students based on their status in relation to a specific assignment. This feature allows you to send simultaneous messages to all of the students who fall into one of four categories for a specific assignment (e.g. you could send a reminder to all students who haven't submitted a given assignment by the due date, such as "Reminder: Your assignment is now one day late. Please submit your finished assignment as soon as possible to avoid losing points."). The four categories of students you can message using this feature are:

Students who haven't submitted yet
Students who haven't been graded yet
Students who scored less than a particular score
Students who scored more than a particular score

To learn more about sending a message to students from the Gradebook follow the steps in this tutorial:

How do I send a message to students from the Gradebook? (External resource)

Announcements Within Groups

Using Announcements within Groups will allow you to send group-specific communications to any student groups you have created in your course. For example, if you have differentiated projects for different groups, you can create separate announcements for each group to remind them of their specific assignment expectations, to provide a relevant course link, etc.

To learn more about making an announcement in a group, follow the steps in this tutorial:

How do I add an announcement in a group? (External resource)