Help & Support: Communication Preferences

Canvas is unique in that it pushes communication out from your courses to the tools and programs you use everyday. You can set up how you want to be contacted by teachers, fellow students and Canvas as well as how often you want to be kept up to date.

You can get to your communications preferences by clicking on the "Profile" tab or by clicking on your username.

There's a lot of cool stuff here. Skip to a section that suites you.

• Get alerts and reminders on your cell phone
• Use a different email than the one on file with my university
• Change how often you get notifications
• Frequency of Notification - Definitions
• Types of Notifications - Definitions

Get alerts and reminders on your cell phone

That's right. Get a text message (SMS) when you ace your exams. Get a reminder about that project due tomorrow.

You know the drill. Standard text message rates apply. You should know if you have to pay for them on your phone plan. We just send 'em if you want 'em.

Click on the "Add Contact Method" of "Other Contacts".

Give us your full phone number including area code. We're using the email gateway for each phone carrier. That's why you see us constructing an email address from your phone number. If you've got a carrier we don't know about you can still get messages, you'll have to enter the email gateway for your cell service yourself.

Confirming your phone number

We won't start sending messages and notifications until we've confirmed that the phone number is yours.

We'll text you a four-digit confirmation code to the phone number you gave us.

Type it in here and we're golden.

Use a different email than the one on file with my university

Remember how you supplied your hotmail address when you applied for college, but now you only check it every once and a while since you've found the bliss that is GMail? You can set up as many email addresses to receive notification from your courses as you want.

Click to add an email address in the "Ways to Contact" sidebar.

You'll be prompted to give the email in question.

When an email address is added to Canvas, we've got to "confirm" that the email address is legit (and you'll know we can send to it) and that it's not someone else pulling pranks with your contact info. We send an email to the address, just click on the link when you get it and we're good to go.

You can remove an email by clicking on the garbage can icon in the list of email addresses.

Change how often you get notifications

Not only can you decide how you want to be kept in contact, you can also choose the frequency.

Go to the "Communication Preferences" section of the "Profile" tab

You can see/set the frequency and communication channel (email, cell, etc.) for each notification type.

Notifications can be sent to multiple communication channels by clicking on the "And Also" action on the right for each notification type.

For the announcement settings above, I'll get:

1. at most one email message a day with all the announcements inside.
2. a text message with the subject line of each announcement right away.

The background of each box is yellow, reminding you that your new preferences have not been saved. That button is at the bottom of the page.

Frequency of Notification - Definitions

Right Away

Fairly self explanatory. We'll send the message right away. Even though we sent it, it might take a few moments for it to reach you.

Daily

Instead of sending right away, we'll keep all the notifications we would have sent you during the day and put them into a single notification.

Weekly

We keep a weeks worth of notifications before we send out one encyclopedia of a notification for your reading pleasure. Sure this is less chatty; but you might miss out on "the now".

Never

Careful choosing this one. With great power comes great responsibility.

Types of Notifications - Definitions

For new announcements

Notification message fired off when a new announcement on the course is created. The full message is sent in the email, only the subject is sent to your cell phone.

For changes to course pages

This notification is sent if the teacher modifies the content or the due date of an assignment. Be sure to check this out; it might mean the project you're working on doesn't need that beastly section C on microbial fungus for pharmaceutical manufacture.

For new topics

This notification is sent when any new topics show up in the discussion board, or if someone comments on a message you wrote in the online discussion.

For due date changes

Lets you know if any new assignments have been scheduled or if an existing assignment is now due on a different day.

For course grading alerts

This alert is sent when one of your assignments has been graded, recorded and published for you too see it. In the email you'll get a link. In the text message, it'll let you know that it happened. To protect your privacy, we'll never send the actual score/grade in the text of this notification.

For new invitations

This refers to invitations you receive to participate in another course, either as a student, teacher or TA.

For calendar changes

This alert is sounded if any scheduled event has been moved. This is different from a due date change since this event fires for non-assignment events, like lectures and field trips.