If you follow the Release Notes then you probably noticed that Canvas is trying out something new called "Student Performance Texts." These texts are to help students better manage their course work and applies to students who have provided their phone number in their Canvas profile. For right now there are only two types of notifications: (1) reminder to turn in any unsubmitted online assignments that are still available after the due date and (2) reminder to retry a quiz if a quiz contains multiple attempts and the highest score was less than an A or 95%.
I'm pretty excited about this because @James had his statistics students research "what students want" in terms of communication from the College, including Canvas. Overall the majority seem to want information via text message and in terms of this type of automated text notification, they would REALLY like to know if an assignment due date is coming up and they haven't submitted the assignment. So maybe if it's 24 hours (or 12 hours) until a due date and the student hasn't submitted the assignment then they get a text notification. Hopefully this is coming, but for now we had our first report from a student that they got one of the text notifications (see below)
This definitely got the student's attention and if the student hadn't already submitted the assignment then I think it would have prompted them to get it done! As it is there appears to possibly be a bug of some type since the student got a text before the assignment was even due and even though the assignment was already submitted. This was part of a group assignment (graded as a group, not individually) so I'm wondering if it's because this specific student didn't turn in the assignment - even though someone from the group did submit it.
Regardless, I think there are a lot of benefits to student performance texts and I hope someday soon they include more performance/grade scenarios and the ability for Instructors and Admins to see which students received a text (and the type of text).
