Notification settings

[natalie_norton1]

We encourage students to check their notification settings, but we are getting a lot of feedback that they find them very confusing and are not sure what they all mean!  Sometimes they feel overwhelmed by emails and the danger is they then turn everything off. 

We were wondering if anyone has tried modifying the notification settings screen to make important ones stand out (e.g. announcements) or has produced a student friendly guide to what they all mean?  We have this one https://s3.amazonaws.com/tr-learncanvas/docs/CanvasNotifications.pdf  but that is a bit too much info for the students

Any tips on how you handle this would be great! 

[Chris_Hofer]

Hi  @natalie_norton1 ...

When your students place their mouse over any of the rows, they get a little pop-up dialog box that explains, in further detail, what that particular notification notifies them of.  Have they seen this?

[natalie_norton1]

Thank you  - I don't think they get that far! They just see a long list and get a bit overwhelmed I think (especially the new first years) as a lot of the terminology is not familiar to them. We're trying to figure out the best way to handle it - faculties are concerned because students keep turning off announcements and missing urgent messages. 

We're trying to work out if we could do something custom to use colours to show which ones are really important and which ones are not relevant. Thought it was worth asking if anyone has tried it...! 

[natalie_norton1]

Just in case of interest, we have managed to add some colours to that screen to help students identify the most important types of notification! We are hoping this will help a bit.

[kmeeusen]

Hi Natalie:

I like that you did this as a school. What one school or person finds important, another school or person may find irrelevant so I don't think a change for all users would be appropriate.

I would also note that Notifications come with default settings, and one of those is to always send notices for Announcements ASAP. The ASAP defaults also include:

• Grading
• Invitation
• Added to Conversation
• Conversation Message
• Appointment signups
• Appointment cancellations
• Appointment availability
• Recording ready

I would suggest providing your students with some prompts - sort of a "these are the settings we find important" kind of thing to help guide them.

I hope this helps.

[natalie_norton1]

Thanks Kelly. Yes, we do certainly provide all the guidelines to them and cover it in the introductions and inductions, but were just getting a lot of feedback that as term went on they started just turning everything off and missing key messages, which is a bit of a disaster! We held some student drop ins and they fed back that they find that page really confusing as there are so many options (which is great to have that flexibility) but that they got a bit overwhelmed, so we are hoping the colours might just help them identify the most important ones and the ones that are just for staff! Fingers crossed!

[Robbie_Grant]

 @natalie_norton1 ,

We are giving the Canvas Admins area a little bit of love and just want to check in with you.  This will also bring this question new attention. 

Were you able to find an answer to your question? I am going to go ahead and mark this question as answered because there hasn't been any more activity in a while so I assume that you have the information that you need. If you still have a question about this or if you have information that you would like to share with the community, by all means, please do come back and leave a comment.  Also, if this question has been answered by one of the previous replies, please feel free to mark that answer as correct.

Robbie