Elementary Mode Courses - Can students use their Inbox to talk to instructors?

Question

Hello,

We are an after school K-12, so we liked the simplicity of Elementary mode for courses.

During development, when acting as a test student in Student View, the Inbox functionality is "Access Denied".

Before we get too far into development, will this be enabled once live with a normal Student-level account, or is it just an issue with "Student View"?

Side Question: We want Students to message their instructors, and vice versa, but not each other. Is this possible?

Chris · Accepted Answer

Hi @AndyEMC,

Yes, this should generally work fine with actual user accounts.  As you may or may not have noticed yet, using "student view" creates somewhat of a pseudo-account that's tied to a specific course, which you'll see in that course's gradebook.  This means while using student view, if you click on global navigation (far left menu) items, you'll often get errors because the account is not a full account and can't access things outside of a course.  So student view gives a very accurate view of what a student will see in one course, but you won't be able to see other areas of Canvas using that view.

Hope this helps!

-Chris