How to disable student to student messaging on FREE CANVAS

Question

I have been using the free canvas app with my students as my school is a private school without an LMS, and I have not been able to find a way to disable student to student messaging on inbox. I saw a supposed checkbox that I could unmark in the settings according to some Google searches, but this box did not appear in my own account. Any ideas? I do not want students to be able to communicate online at all, especially if I can;t see it.

Thanks!

dbrace · Accepted Answer

Hi @MiriamSenft,

Can you please reply with a link (or picture of) the Google Search result that you saw? I have a Canvas Free for Teachers (FFT) user account for testing and I cannot find anything for disabling the Canvas Inbox.

When it comes to the FFT edition of the Canvas LMS, there are circumstances where some functionality either does not exist or cannot be disabled (or enabled) and that is because of it being a free account and adjusting settings require administrative access to the system and that type of role/permission does not exist for the FFT edition of the Canvas LMS.

Canvas Free for Teacher Account Comparison

The Canvas Inbox (sometimes referred to in other Canvas/Instructure documentation as "Conversations") is not listed in the comparison but I wanted to share it as general information.

For that it is worth, with a paid-for edition of the Canvas LMS, the ability to disable the Canvas Inbox messaging feature would be a decision that is made (possibly/hopefully after consulting with faculty and administrators at the institution) by the team that manages the Canvas LMS (and it is not something that an individual faculty member can enable or disable) and after reaching out to the institution's Instructure Customer Success Manager.

-Doug

NoahBoswell · Accepted Answer

@MiriamSenft ...

In addition to what @dbrace said, I too am curious to see an image of what you saw on Google, just out of curiosity. The button you likely saw is located within the admin-account (an admin account is a place where all of the admin settings, courses, people, statistics, etc are stored and located for a specific school), and with the free version of Canvas the only people that have access to that are the Instructure Employees that manage the free instance, and it is not available to other users that sign up for a free account.

That said, and Doug is absolutely correct, adjusting some settings requires admin access. That said, you are not able to change any account-level settings such as inbox permissions without having it.

I hope that helps, too.

Noah