Push notifications for Admins

[hesspe]

Would it be useful for you as an Account Admin to be able push out urgent notifications?  What I'm imagining is an email sent ASAP to all users and a popup message that appears the first time a user logs into Canvas after the message is posted  Or is this too much power to place in the hands of an admin?  Do you think it would be beneficial to give Teachers a more limited "push" option, restricted to her course (of course) and perhaps that sends an ASAP email without the pop-up?  Perhaps it could be built around Canvas messaging by providing a way to pop urgent messages to the foreground.  Messages that appear in the Dashboard don't work for us, since our portal takes people directly to their selected course, bypassing the dashboard.  Even without the portal, people would use links to the course home page and skip the dashboard. 

[kona · Accepted solution]

 @hesspe ​, we've more or less already done this using courses. I've got one course with all my faculty and another course with all of our students (each semester is it's own section). Because the student course is broken apart by semester/section I can target students enrolled just this semester when I send out my message. For the faculty course (which is also our mandatory Training course and has useful College/Canvas resources), I have it set up in the gradebook as to which instructors are qualified to teach traditional, hybrid, and/or online courses in Canvas. Using this I can then send out targeted emails just to faculty who teach online or just to faculty who teach hybrid courses, etc. Overall this works really well and I'm pretty happy with how it works.

[mzucal]

Kona,

How many students do you have enrolled in a semester (average)?

[kona]

 @mzucal , we normally have around 2500-2700 students (give or take).

[hesspe]

Much belated reply and thanks to  @kona   I appreciate the suggestion of creating a site to push out Admin announcements and have proposed that we do just that at our school, though so far with no result.  I'm somewhat doubtful that it will happen.  I still think it makes sense to have notifications for Admin announcements  implemented as a Canvas feature, so I have entered it as a feature request here:  https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/10236-adding-a-notifications-option-for-global-announcements  (Feel free to vote on it.) Why not just adopt your suggestion?  The most prominent drawback is the social-capital expense involved in getting it approved.  Indiscriminate messaging of faculty and/or students is looked upon askance by many in our community, and administrators in particular.  Probably rightly so.  Also, there's the matter of upkeep of the course rosters, since we would want to be conscientious about removing people for whom, in any given semester, getting Admin messages would be irrelevant or unwanted.  If it were a Canvas feature, "anti-spamming" objections could be made, but if it is baked-in, and doesn't identify anyone local as the person who approved it, it would go down easier.

[Robbie_Grant]

 @hesspe ,

We are giving the Canvas Admins area a little bit of love (especially questions that are really, really old) 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

[hesspe]

We still have the problem of how to reach people with Admin (global) announcements, since at BC people usually access Canvas through our portal, bypassing the dashboard to land on their selected course home page.  The solution I offered in creating this discussion seems impractical.  I have another less far-reaching suggestion to make that could address the problem we have, but I'll create another discussion for it when I get the chance.