[Inbox] Limit Student Messages in Canvas Inbox to Teacher in Enrolled Section when 'Conversations send messages to individual course members' disabled
In one of our institutions, we have courses set up to use sections ( Solved: What are sections in a canvas course? - Instructure Community ), and one Teacher is assigned to/enrolled in each section. All Student and Teacher users have 'limit this user to see only fellow section users' enabled ( How do I limit a user to only interact with other ... - Instructure Community ), as while the same content within the course is shared between the sections, our intention is for each section to be independent to each other, and not interacting with each other.
For our Student course role, we have the default permission 'Conversations- send messages to individual course members' disabled, as we don't want our K-12 students able to communicate with each other outside of faculty/administrative oversight. We recently discovered that with the 'Conversations- send messages to individual course members' permission disabled, when a student composes a new message in Canvas Inbox to their assigned Teacher within their section, instead of just seeing their assigned Teacher, they see a list of all enrolled Teacher users within the course. This causes confusion for the student, as they should only be aware of and able to interact with their own assigned Teacher from within their section. We learned when engaging with Canvas Support that if we enable 'Conversations- send messages to individual course members' for the Student course role, then the 'limit this user to see only fellow section users' setting is respected in Canvas Inbox, and students are only presented with their assigned Teacher within their enrolled section as an option to send a message to.
The problem we intend to solve is this: we're seeking the ability to create an environment where students are disallowed from messaging each other through Canvas Inbox, and are only able to message the Teacher that is enrolled in the same course section as them. As it stands today, you are forced to choose - either allow students to message each other and allow the student to only see the Teacher in their own section, or, disallow students to message each other and present students with all enrolled Teachers in the course.
If Instructure can make a backend adjustment to allow 'limit this user to see only fellow section users' to be respected when 'Conversations- send messages to individual course members' is disabled for the Student course role, that will resolve this issue, as then students would only see the Teacher enrolled in the same section as they are when composing a message through Canvas Inbox.
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