[ARCHIVED] Announcements posted to Course Section still sends notifications to Teachers and Examiners

[rolfis]

Hi all!

We've recently discovered a bug or feature, which has to do with Announcements and Notifications. I'm not sure if this is the intended behavior and if so, could someone elaborate on the logic behind it?

Please look at this example:
We have a course with a specific section: "Section 1", and this section only includes some people with Student enrollments.

If an Examiner creates a new announcement, and chooses "Post to" and only "Section 1", the announcement is visible for students in this section, but it is also visible to Examiners and Teachers in the course.

So far I can understand the logic, because higher access privileges should probably see everything in the course announcements.

The problem arises when Teachers and Examiners have email notifications turned on for new announcements. They get alerted even though they are not part of the section for the announcement. And if they turn off notifications, they have to do it for all – there could be other announcements which they would like to be notified about in the course.

How should one think about this? I understand the technical part, it's just listing what is available to the Teacher or Examiner under Announcements, and sends a notification if new ones are created. But isn't it also very inconvenient for the Teacher and Examiner to get notifications, when the announcement was intended for a section they are not part of?

Or are we thinking the wrong way about announcements, is this something that has higher value and should always be notified about to Teachers and Students? Should a Teacher posting an announcement to a specific section really use some other way of communicating?

Any input and thoughts about this would be appreciated.

All the best,
Rolf Johansson
Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden

[Jul_Cro]

Hi Rolf, 

At our college, with our faculty, this would be a case of teaching the faculty to use email filters. This is the most unpopular answer of course, because faculty do not want to have to do something extra. 

I can see it from the other point of view, what if you have the  teacher and examiner that are supervising the course and they did not receive the announcements from one of the examiners and there was a problem with it? Then they would be the ones complaining. 

To me this is an inconvenience for a few, but the larger whole likely benefit from it. Also, to create a checkbox of who to notify on posting would be nice, but it is probably super low on the list of things for Canvas to do better with the UI since it is one of those things that it would be better for faculty and does not really affect the students. 

Sorry for the bummer answer but I was sad that no one had commented in the whole month! 

Juliet

[Nancy_Webb_CCSF]

Hi @rolfis , 

Are the teachers and examiners limited to viewing those in their own sections? That seems to limit at least some notifications to section only.  How do I limit a user to only interact with other ... - Instructure Community (canvaslms.com) 

Or, do you not want to limit the teachers and examiners to only view those users in their own sections, but just want the notifications to be limited? You might want to vote on this idea, although it's unclear whether this idea takes into account the section only access setting.  Notifications by Sections - Instructure Community (canvaslms.com)