This feature would also bring announcements in line with other tools in Canvas that use publish and unpublish functionality and would help instructors who might unintentionally be releasing announcements to students from a past semester.
This feature would also bring announcements in line with other tools in Canvas that use publish and unpublish functionality and would help instructors who might unintentionally be releasing announcements to students from a past semester.
Voted! Regarding John Thomson's comment:
With Save & Publish now in the Canvas Beta Release Notes (2015-05-04) for the current set of Draft State-capable features, which option seems better to everyone if Announcements becomes capable of Draft State?
Control over the Announcements is a MUST! When a previous course is imported, the Announcements are sent out even if the course is Unpublished. This is a flaw in the Canvas design. Again, this is a design flaw which must be corrected, rather than a tweak or preference. Instructors should have complete control over the Announcement feature.
I agree with Dallas E Hulsey. We have several instructors who are not aware that when they copy a course all the announcements from previous semester are visible to students. It would be nice if they came over unpublished and then the instructor can reuse and publish the announcements as needed.
Case in point: I just learned about this quirk from reading this thread ... after importing a whole course. I came to the boards trying to figure out how to hide or unpublish the announcements, so that I can edit and release them as we go. I'm pretty bummed to think that the announcements from last year have already been sent out. I would never have guessed that would happen!
We just discovered this (starting our 2nd semester of using Canvas). Faculty did not realize their copied announcements would automatically go out in the new class. This really needs to be fixed so that faculty can copy the content but make the announcements unpublished in the new course. I agree that consistent use of Save and Publish would be the way to go for these. I'll be updating our start of the semester checklist to add a warning to copy only specific content and not Announcements.
Dallas, this would make preparing a course at the beginning of every semester so much easier. My current workaround is to import everything except announcements into my new course shell, then importing the announcements separately into a sandbox, and then copying, pasting, and editing every announcement as necessary in order to re-post it in the new course--and of course, I have to remember to do that on a regular basis. Even typing the workaround takes more time than a simple publish/unpublish feature.
I would also like to see statuses or categories on the Announcement Pages. For example:
All of these ideas would be great, but from a programming perspective I am wondering if adding a "end date" box might be easier. If it has "ended" then maybe it would gray out which would indicate it is no longer visible. Not sure.
If have end dates on our Campus-wide announcements, but from the Admin interface it doesn't matter. All the announcements show all the time. There is no collapsing them, no way to mark them as posted or pending release. Right now it is one very long, scrolling page (and that's just after two years).
I'm hoping that if they can cleanup the "course" announcement area that some of those changes will also make it up to "Global Announcement" area.
That said, I would love to see Course Announcements have both start and stop date and time (instead of just the delayed posting date and time).
Absolutely need this functionality in announcements. And I agree- I wish that when I look at the list of all my announcements I could easily tell a) if it has been published/sent yet or not b)what date it was sent and c) what date it is scheduled to send.
I use announcements as an integral part of my teaching and right now using it is tedious when I import, but also daunting to start from scratch each quarter.
I think this is an excellenta suggestion but what might be even easier to do is to just allow the opportunity to have a "turn off" date when you set up a delay posting date. This way when you transfer the course it would already be turned off and faculty can just change the dates when they are ready for it.
Thanks for the feedback, everybody!
We'll likely cover this request in workshop next week, and I'll report back afterwards.
My apologies if this has already been asked, but has there been any discussion or thought into adding duration lengths to Announcements? By this I mean, I know we can already delay announcements from being published until a certain date, but it would be beneficial to have an option to set a date for an announcement to un-publish automatically as well. I have found that instructors in some instances don't like the idea of having to go in and manually 'hide' an announcement.
Hope everybody's fall start is going well!
Quick update: This idea has been added to part of a larger Announcements enhancements effort, which is second in communications priority to Conversations (i.e., Inbox) enhancements. We are in the process of capacity planning for 2016, so stay tuned for additional updates.
Hey, Peyton! We have passed early 2016. Is the larger project for announcement enhancements still on the radar?
I set up release dates on announcements prior to the course being published. But I can see where someone might be delayed and need to import after the course is published. I can only imagine doing so and the system sending students a blast of some 20+ announcements... ;o)
A single page with ALL announcements (e.g. by title) and an edit/delay posting date would be great. Please consider opening this suggestion back up again.
I agree with this suggestion. Prior LMS system left announcements and assignments unpublished (not released), and clearly distinguished which were available. Just spend a long session in Chat with Canvas, and all they could say is go to the Student View to see what is visible to students. This is a real disappointment.
I would also like to see assignments brought over with the suggested date (updated for new semester as Canvas nicely does) but without releasing them automatically. I typically tweak announcements and assignments each semester, yet appreciate having drafts from prior semester.
I would like to echo several of the previous posts. I just became aware that announcements were set to automatically go out to students, and I would have loved to give my faculty a heads up about this. At this moment, the only workaround I can think of is to keep a copy of the announcement text in an unpublished page and not import the announcements themselves from semester to semester. It sure would be nice if we could publish/unpublish.
Adding on as a requester for this feature as well. I would love to have an end date option for each course announcement. I want to save them all so that I can import them from semester-to-semester but I don't want students to see all of them (the list grows as the term progresses). Adding an end date like is in place with system announcements would be beneficial.
What is the point of voting for ideas if they never get implemented? It seems like this would be a simple idea to implement, given that you can publish and unpublish just about everything else, but here it is more than a year after this idea was "accepted" and I this incredibly basic functionality is still missing. My institution just moved to canvas this semester and frankly it has been a frustrating disappointment.
Hi Brandon Davies ! I used my prior LMS for over a decade so change was initially challenging for me. Once I began adjusting my process to fit how Canvas functions I found new joy in the simplicity. As related to announcements, I needed to plan ahead and thus copy in my announcements ahead of term start.
As for your comment about the voting and such let me say I understand your point. There are many pages of ideas (currently 26) with 20 ideas per page. And these cycle through and are updated every few months. While I get the point that gathering the voice of the customer is important, and I appreciate the notion of democratizing the identification via popular vote, I am thinking that keeping track of, developing or setting aside nearly 500 ideas every quarter or thereabouts is a daunting task. The folks in the community, the staff, volunteers, and our peers certainly do a fine job of sorting the wheat from the chaff and I thank them for their effort. Perhaps the forum is a victim of its own success in that everyone with an idea can post it. Even a guy named Jeff.
Having unpublished drafts of announcements goes beyond just importing last years announcements (though that is an important consideration). As is, if I'm writing an announcements and get interrupted (occurs all too often), it would be nice just to save what I have done and not have to worry about it. As is, if I hit "save" it would send a half written announcement to all my students, or I can not do anything and hope that the web page is still up when I get back to it, or I can awkwardly set a time for the announcement to post.
My comments about voting was not to say that every idea should be implemented. Honestly, I am not sure I think this "suggest an idea and hope that enough people who actually like it read your idea and vote for it before time is up" is really a good idea. My frustration is that this idea did get sufficient votes, has a comment from Canvas indicating that it will be implemented, and more than a year later....nothing. No indication if it will ever be implemented, yet anyone posting this idea again simply gets referred back to this thread. It kind of undermines any confidence that posting ideas and voting on them is at all meaningful.
Certainly, the people on this forum are helpful, and I thank them for that.
Yes, I am a bit saddened that we have not seen any movement on the project for announcements that Peyton Craighill referred to last year. Even a note that this project has been delayed until 2017 to make room for other big projects like the new Quizzing would be nice. As it is, I am sort of feeling like this request has fallen through the cracks and demonstrates the danger of archiving requests with the promise of future development.
Product Radar seems like a step backwards here. Seems to indicate that this important fix has gone from part of a "larger Announcements enhancements effort" to "we have no plans to implement this idea any time soon but we aren't going to kill it outright so users retain some glimmer of hope" (i.e. product radar). My guess is that the way Announcements are currently coded makes implementing this very simple and sensible idea impossible. Thus implementation requires a complete rewrite of how announcements are handled. If this is the case, I wish someone would just come out and say that. Otherwise there really is no excuse for not implementing this idea.
I'd love to see this feature. It's a problem when I import a course and all previously saved announcements are automatically published. What I really want, though, is to be able to work on an announcement over more than one work session. Often my announcements involve complex student feedback that is compiled as I grade many announcements. I need to save announcement drafts because otherwise my work is lost if I need to temporarily log off my computer. Keeping them unpublished until complete would do this job just fine.
I can recall a few times where I had entered a masterpiece of feedback and then accidentally pressed a key which refreshed the page. Now that I have multiple monitors I am very keen to first write the text in Notepad and then copy into the Canvas Announcement and then apply formatting. Thinking out loud, an auto save of any draft text would be tres chic.
The bummer of the story is that this project never made it through the prioritization. In the thread above Peyton said that he hoped it would, along with another communications project, but they didn't. This idea remains on our radar though - as one that we'd like to prioritize in the future. Follow this idea to get updates when they're available!
That is disappointing, Renee Carney. I do appreciate that you have provided a status update to this feature request though as I had indeed been wondering why there was not a follow up after Peyton's optimistic post.
A simple 'end date' window will solve the problem of having future semester announcements being automatically published. This is a basic feature in all LMS systems I've used. Canvas provides it in quizzes and discussion board areas, why isn't it included with announcements? I brought this up well over a year ago, and the suggestion went nowhere. Like other instructors have mentioned previously, there is a need to recycle announcements each semester, and if they are closed, it's not a problem to create a new open/close date when it's convenient. This feature needs to be added now.
Yes dates could work and should be there as well but publishing and unpublishing would be much easier as a simple toggle on n off than adding/updating end dates - especially when they are automatically copied from course to course. But the option to also delete several at a time after they are all copied over would be nice as well.
I am overjoyed to read this suggestion, and I support it wholeheartedly!!! When copying a course to a new semester, I do not what to have to go back and reset each individual posting date. This could be accomplished with a number of approaches - please pick one and go with it!
1) Publish/Unpublish feature with Unpublish as the default when copying
2) Allow and End Date, with the default set to end on the day a course is copied (thus masking it until the instructor chooses)
3) When setting the delay option, allow for "delay indefinitely" and default to "delay indefinitely" when copying.
Again, please pick an option and proceed. The current setup is cumbersome for folks who want control over announcements...
I have been thinking about this for over two years - just saw a new look about Announcement - Delayed..., which is an improved feature but I still need to change date every time I teach a course. Anyhow, after seeing the new feature, I was about to make a suggestion on this idea and viola! Great minds think alike! I think having a publish button will be much less labor intensive.
I find it very frustrating that this discussion has been ongoing since Dallas Hulsey originated the idea almost three years ago! For those who don't know, the 'publish/unpublish' and/or 'open/close date'
window features have been available to college administrators for a long time. Why can't this admin code be implemented into the instructor shells? Everyone who has contributed their thoughts on this are all valid points. The solution is to offer both features of 'publish/unpublish' and 'open/close' windows which should satisfy all instructors to utilize either feature of their own preference.
I think it's fair to say that most of us are fans of Canvas, and think that the benefits far outweigh the costs compared to most other products out there. But I have to admit, there are about 2-3 features that users have been asking for, for years now, that are so basic and fundamental that it almost seems laughable that it hasn't been done yet. This is one of those (along with the student image uploads in discussions). This is such a pain point and an annoyance for faculty, semester after semester to have to go through 2-3 courses and either delete or delay potentially dozens of announcements. That time could be much better spent planning learning activities and assessments. Come on Instructure, what are you waiting for?
This idea was initially suggested by Dallas Hulsey back in 2015! I also started a conversation on it shortly afterward. Having the ability to 'publish / unpublish' and 'open / close' date windows for announcements is so basic that it should be an embarassment to the Canvas developers that this has not been addressed by now. I learned from one of my schools that administrators have both features so it satisfies the needs for those who want to use either option. Since Canvas already has the code implemented at the administration level, it mystifies me why they cannot get these options setup for instructors.
Not being able to show/hide announcements is my biggest frustration with Canvas, especially with my online classes where I have 12-15 announcements per class. I was recently at a conference and spoke to a couple of people at the Canvas booth about this. They said it was a great idea and to post it on here for voting.
I wholeheartedly agree with this thread that we need to be able to publish/unpublish announcements at a click AND that by default all imported announcements should be set to UNPUBLISHED at the moment they are imported from another course. This does not mean I want the date range feature to go away however. I definitely want to be able to set up not only when the announcement goes live, but when it disappears for students as well. I don't need announcements made at the start of the semester cluttering up the announcements page a student sees.
It's worth noting, and very frustrating to say the least, that this idea was originally posted back in April, 2015, and still, Canvas has yet to address this much needed feature after three and half years! It's so basic that the developers should be embarrassed this feaure has not yet been included for instructors. As noted in previous correspondence, administrators have this feature allowing for 'publish/unpublish' and 'open/end' date announcements, so what's the problem in using the already implemented code in instructors announcement pages? Not having these features requires more unneeded steps to correct unwanted announcements, and one item that no one has mentioned is it makes the instructor look unorganized and not in control of their material if he or she misses deleting or advancing a date on previously used announcements.
Yes, Yes, Yes! Being able to unpublish and publish announcements from a copied course would be a HUGE time saver! The alternative is either deleting and re-creating announcements or delaying their posting and hoping to remember the changes that were made. Please make this feature available as soon as possible. Thanks.
We just switched to Canvas. Putting a date on each announcement is a real pain -- faculty just want to be able to hide them from the students but not have to add a date. This is important so that they can copy announcements from a previous course and not have them all showing to students immediately. They should copy over and be hidden by default.
We have had to tell faculty to not copy their announcements over, but recreate announcements as they go thru the semester. This is a real design flaw, so I hope this will be fixed soon.
The Radar idea stage has been removed from the Feature Idea Process. You can read more about why in the blog post Adaptation: Feature Idea Process Changes.
This change will only impact the stage sort of this idea and will not change how it is voted on or how it is considered during prioritization activities. This change will streamline the list of ideas 'open for voting', making it easier for you to see the true top voted ideas in one sort, here.
We have a lot of instructors who use the same announcements each semester. However, importing them also brings the incorrect dates and information. Unless you assign a new release date, students are able to see the old announcement from the word "go". Being able to publish/unpublish would be so fantastic! Great idea.
I make announcement everyday of the semester with the daily agenda so I have roughly 75 announcements per semester times 2 because I teach two different classes. So basically my options are to delete all 75 and then copy and paste each of them one at a time from the previous course throughout the semester (moving back and forth between two different courses) or click on all 75 individually in the new course and set the delay date for each of them prior to publishing. This is very time consuming. I would think that once the announcement are copied over from another course instead of having them all show up as published in the new course where students will see all 75 of them (not aligned with correct dates for the new semester) as soon as the course itself is published these copied announcements would be hidden from students but visible to the teacher so the teacher could modify them for the new semester and make them visible when needed throughout the semester. Hope this fix happens soon as I have been doing this for 3 years now.
It amazes me that this request has been ongoing since 2015, and yet, nothing has changed with the annoucement feature of having the option of 'publish/unpublish' and 'close date' features. It's a simple, standard protocol for other LMS programs I've used....all have 'open and close' date windows. I teach six sections in Canvas and the hassle of having to either delete announcements or advance the date well ahead of the preferred close date is a major frustration, waste of time, and if any are missed in changing, they will show up to students incorrectly. I've mentioned this before that school administrators have both "publish/unpublish' and 'open/close date' features to use in their announcements. Why can't Instructure get this done for the main group of people who use Canvas? Based on so many instructor comments, it is an irratation that this basic feature is still not available after four years. I wonder if anyone from Instructure reads these comments.
Ditto!!
Marcia Woodard
Senior Associate Faculty
English and Engineering Departments
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I came here to find out how to unpublish announcements from last semester, but apparently that is not an option. I will be happy to manually publish each announcement when the time comes. But do I understand that when I imported last semester's course into the current shell messages were sent to each student? As in, 12 messages to each student?
Also, w/out the unpublish/hide option, do I now need to delete all of the announcements in the current shell?
This is an excellent suggestion! I'd add that the current "Save" button causes confusion. Except when the announcement is delayed, this action is really more of a "Send" in instructor's minds.