[ARCHIVED] How Do You Use Global Announcements?

[Chris_Hofer]

How do you all use the Canvas Dashboard?  We use it almost every week to post thing like:

• Canvas beta/production release notes
• LTI tools that we've enabled at the Account level for everyone
• How-to Guides
• Info about up-coming graduation
• Contests for our faculty

Also, while I'm certainly no graphics artist, I came up with this little banner to post tomorrow morning on our Canvas Dashboard with some info on how voting works.  The "OPEN" sign was just a *.png file I found by searching Google.  Nothing fancy...but it works.

So, what kinds of stuff do you display on your Canvas Dashboard for instructors/students?

[kona]

We don't use the dashboard at all, so I'm curious what your voting now - or something similar - looks like on your Canvas dashboard. Would you mind sharing a screen shot? Where do you go in Canvas to add this information? Also, just curious, can you limit who sees this on the dashboard to teachers or does everyone see what you add to the dashboard.

[kona]

Ah, I think snugent​ may have answered my question.  @Chris_Hofer  are you referring to adding a global announcement? If so, then we try not to that very often. My thought was the more often we use it the less likely people are to actually pay attention to it. We had the ability to do something like this in Angel and students tended to ignore it. Do you not find that to be true?

[snugent]

Yes  @kona ​ that was my thinking too. I like  @Chris_Hofer ​'s idea. I'm having hard time getting people involved in the Canvas community and something like this may help.

[Chris_Hofer]

Yup...Global Announcements on the Canvas Dashboard.  Maybe I should have been more clear on that.

We don't have a lot of data to determine if our announcements are valuable or not.  I just added one more idea to my original post on holding contests.  In our latest contest, we gave away a Canvas t-shirt we had gotten from Instructure.  In the contest form, we had asked people to rate (on a scale of 1 to 10...10 being best) how valuable our announcements were.  Only four people entered the contest, and we had ratings of 6, 9, 6, and 10.

[kona]

Well... how large is your student (or faculty) population? If you say 10 then you're response rate isn't that bad...

In general if I send an email out to faculty (or students) via Canvas I normally get around a 35-40% response rate. I figure that's pretty good, but I'm always looking for better way to communicate new and updated information to faculty.

[jordan]

Initial response:

Hey Kona I don't know if you received your answer but EVERYONE will see your announcement on the dashboard. A good reason to be hesitant about using it. But from what I've seen I definitely think institutions could leverage this tool a little more frequently. I'm interested to see all the ideas that come in here.

Edit:

I guess it's been too long since I've trained on Canvas! I stand corrected... as we've recently added the ability for you to determine (by role) who sees your announcements!

[kona]

Deactivated user, yes, I knew about the break down (by roles). There was a little confusion about what Chris meant by Dashboard. Once I realized what he was talking about I knew who could see it/couldn't see it because we leverage it for student announcements at least twice a semester.

[mnieckoski]

Thanks Jordan and all,

I'm jumping into this a little late, but I feel the need to point out that targeting global announcements by role may have limited value depending on how you use Canvas.

I discovered this when I sent global announcements to Students (about graduation requirements, for instance), that many faculty were also receiving the announcement and were puzzled by why I wanted them to know what to do about graduation!  A quick call to Canvas support solved the mystery.  Roles are determined at the course-level (Student, Teacher, Observer, etc.), not at the account level. Any individual might be enrolled in one course as teacher, one as student, one as observer, etc., and if a user is enrolled in even one course as a student, they are then sent any global announcements targeted for students.  Virtually all of our faculty are enrolled in our Canvas resource course as students – that was the “leak.”  

This is at the university level, so it might be different at K-12 where the delineation between student and teacher is more clear cut.  It also does not affect account-level roles (admins), so messages can be sent to admins without the possibility of overlap.

FYI: My workaround solution for the Graduates as above was to create an account-level group of the potential graduates, and send announcements via the group, ensuring that only the grads in the group would see the announcements.

Thanks!

--mike

-------------------------------------------------------------

Michael Nieckoski

Canvas Administrator

Keene State College

[snugent]

Nice banner and great idea! I don't use the Dashboard as much as I probably should. One thing that holds me back from using it more is the editor is not as fully functional as it is everywhere else.

[Chris_Hofer]

I agree about editing announcements, and I'll be voting for that idea.

[jordan]

Do you have a link to the idea Chris?

[Chris_Hofer]

Yes...there are actually three ideas (two of which are mine) related to Global Announcements, Deactivated user​:

[achiao]

And don't forget this feature request!

• Create Global Announcement Capability at the Sub-Account Level

[myerdon01]

Not having HTML editor and the ability to edit Global Announcements is very inconvenient! I post an announcement and then I realize I forgot something and then I have to delete the whole thing and start over. At least I have gotten smart and do it in Word first and copy and paste, but still wish I could edit directly.

[Chris_Hofer]

 @myerdon01 ​, have you voted on the two feature ideas I've discussed above?  We're not quite to 30 votes for these ideas, but I sure would like to see an HTML editor and the ability to edit Global Announcements. 

[kona]

Here's an example of what we've got posted right now. It's to encourage students to provide feedback on their courses. It's linked into our single sign-on so if students click on the link they get logged in automatically.

We do something else similar to this for the beginning of the semester except it's a reminder about when courses will open to students (first day of class) and that they have to complete the mandatory student orientation - and we link to the orientation.

[Chris_Hofer]

Here's an announcement I just posted this morning.  I typically post the beta release notes on Tuesday mornings after they are released on Monday nights.  I usually time them so that it runs through Sunday evening...then next Tuesday I'll post the Production Release notes and Deactivated user's video.

[kona]

Is this pushed to everyone or just faculty?​

[Chris_Hofer]

Just to faculty and Admins (so I can confirm that my team sees it, too).

[crafte]

We are still new to Canvas and have been using the global announcements very rarely due to the note in the Canvas guides to use this tool sparingly. Has anyone noticed any performance issues after posting global announcements?

[Chris_Hofer]

No performance issues that I have seen.  Any time we use graphics (which we usually put in the upper right corner), they are small in file size.  I haven't heard any complaints about degraded performance from our faculty or students when we post messages.

[kona]

Nope, none for us.

[striglej]

We only post things of institutional interest.  Mainly maintenance windows for 3 party tools that we have integrations with, such as Turnitin, or college-wide surveys etc.  I might post 4 global announcements per term.

[jordan]

One thing I really like about  @Chris_Hofer ​s examples is that they all seem to have a different image to draw the viewers attention.  @kona ​ this could address your concern about users overlooking the announcements if used to frequently. If you have a different/relevant/fun pic with each announcement it could catch attention better and create the differentiation you need if you decide to start using this tool more frequently 😉

Here's an example I saw at one institution... they posted an announcement telling others how to find help!

Imagine an image like that as a GIF, with the arrow coming in from the right. That could capture the attention of the users. The options are limitless. Hopefully we'll get some other great ideas in here!

[Chris_Hofer]

Yeah...when I post announcements for our faculty, I try and include an image of some kind (usually in the upper right corner) for each.  When the beta and release notes are posted by Instructure, I use a common image for each of those types of announcements...so that people recognize "oh, these are beta notes" or "oh, these are production release notes".  Here are a couple images I found on Google to use:

  

For the most part, most of our announcements are directed toward our faculty.  We only have a couple announcements posted that our students also see.  But, we do post Global Announcements quite often...and we always set start and end dates, too.

[G_Petruzella]

Wow, y'all are a lot more creative in your uses of Global Announcements - we've only ever used them to announce campus closings for snow... #newenglandpanda

[myerdon01]

Here is one I have posted for students right now and I try to use something catchy and colorful so it stands out and I won't leave it posted for too long, I like to change it up.

[mpoole]

I got inspired by all of this last night to create a Canvas Superhero Comic for global announcements.  My new (very originally named) Captain Canvas delivers exciting news about updates and features to tired, overworked teachers.  Here's the first installment:

[G_Petruzella]

 @mpoole ​, I love it! You could totally riff on the "real life" Captain Canvas who was at last year's InstCon...make like she's just a cartoon character for awhile, then give 'em a pic of you Photoshopped in with her (I bet someone from last year's 'con would have a suitable photo to share). 🙂

[mpoole]

 @G_Petruzella ​  Yes! And I can make a new superhero each time and they can all get together at InstructureCon and be the Can-vengers.

Ok.  That may be going a little too far.

[G_Petruzella]

"Too far"? No such thing. 🙂

[kmeeusen]

Melissa:

I have been meaning to ask you something, are you the same Melissa Poole from Quality Matters?

If you are, I hope I didn't just "out you".

Kelley

[mpoole]

​nope. I don't actually know what that is?  I am the academic technology coordinator at St. Paul's school in Concord, NH.

[kmeeusen]

Melissa:

Small world for large coincidences!

Learn more about QM @Quality Matters |

KLM

[Chris_Hofer]

That's awesome, Melissa!  Was there a website you used to create the comic?

[mpoole]

I made it on Storyboard That.  I find it easy to use for those of us challenged in the artistic ability department..

[dwillmore]

We use it as seldom as possible.   We don't want to create 'announcement white-out' where students ignore it.   Canvas issues are sent to all roles.  When we begin loading a term into Canvas is sent to teachers and help desk.  We publish all courses one week prior to the term, and when they are published an announcement is sent to all.

[cstevenson]

We use it for outages and informational.  Here are a couple that we posted recently:

The UI announcement runs for all roles.  It gets everyone looking and talking about it. We send them to preview the new UI in either Test or BETA instance.

[petern]

Do people get notifications if there is a global announcements on the Canvas website?