Features and options

• Make announcements to all users (both students and staff) and to specific sections.
• Canvas sends students an email notification when an announcement is made, according to their set notification preferences.
• Change the default course settings to disallow student replies to announcements. Note: Any student replies will be visible to all users.
• Schedule an announcement ahead of time.

See also:

• To communicate with a group of students or an individual student, see Conversations/inbox.

Guides

On Canvas Community:

• How do I make an announcement in a course?
• How do I disable comments on announcements in a course?

Features and options

• View all the discussions within a course.
• Create discussions and modify discussion settings.
• Discussions can be graded or ungraded.
• Discussion topics can be a focused or threaded discussion. Focused discussions are relatively short-lived interactions, while threaded discussions allow replies within replies and may last for a longer period of time.
• Require that students reply to a discussion before they see any of the other students’ replies.
• Edit your discussion settings to allow your students to create new discussion topics.
• In addition to Canvas discussions, the University of Auckland uses Piazza. Piazza is an LTI tool that integrates with Canvas. It allows anonymous group discussions and student-edited questions and answers.

Guides

On Canvas Community:

• How do I create a discussion?
• How do I allow students to create a course discussion?

Features and options

• Chat content is visible to all enrolled students.
• Any user enrolled in the course can participate.
• A Canvas user must be actively viewing the chat tool to appear in the chat list. Consider posting chat hours in the course calendar to let students know when you are available.
• Chat comments cannot be deleted.
• Currently there is no upper limit for the number of users in a course chat. However, a large number of users may affect chat performance.

See also:

• To communicate with a group of students or an individual student, see Conversations/inbox.

Guides

On Canvas Community:

• How do I use chat?

Features and options

• Communicate with a course, a group, an individual student or a group of students.
• View and reply to conversations and sort them by course or inbox type.
• The conversations feature does not have any file size limits, but attachments added to a conversation are included in the sender’s personal files.

Guides

On Canvas Community:

• How do I use conversations?

Features and options

• Create new conferences, start conferences and manage concluded conferences.
• Create course events in the calendar to indicate an upcoming conference. Note: You can’t send out invitations to the conference until it begins.
• Currently, Canvas integrates with BigBlueButton. BigBlueButton can accommodate up to 50 users in a conference at one time.
• A conference will remain active on BigBlueButton as long as one person is part of the conference room. When the last person leaves, the conference will conclude and all files and chat messages will be removed.
• Share your screen with other participants in a conference using desktop sharing. Moderators can allow any participant to be a presenter at any time.

Guides

On Canvas Community:

• How do I create a conference in a course?
• How do I share my desktop in a conference as a presenter?

Features and options

• Create new collaborations and edit or delete existing collaborations.
• View any collaboration created by students in the course. However, students can only view collaborations that have been shared with them.
• Google Docs allows you to add up to 50 users per collaboration.
• Users can all view and edit a Google Docs document at the same time.

Guides

On Canvas Community:

• How do I create a Google Docs collaboration?

Features and options

• View all created groups within the course.
• View all activity within all the groups within your course, including groups created by students.
• Create a new group set and create subgroups automatically or manually.
• Assign students to subgroups automatically or manually.
• Assign group leaders to each group.
• Allow students to sign up for their own groups.
• Expand and collapse subgroups.
• Move students into different subgroups.
• Create group collaborations.

In a group area, you can:

• Send announcements to group members.
• Create pages
• Share files. 
• Start a discussion.
• Create conferences (based on BigBlueButton).
• Create collaborations (based on Google Docs).

Your students can:

• View the groups list.
• View the groups they are enrolled in.
• Join a student group.
• Create a student group.
• Store and share files.
• Start a discussion.
• Send a message.
• Create group collaborations.

Guides

On Canvas Community:

• How do I add a group set in a course?
• How do I automatically assign students to groups?
• How do I manually assign students to groups?
• How do I create self sign-up groups?
• How do I view content and student activity within a group as a instructor?