[Announcements] Announcement Area ReDesign

[cms_hickss]

Right now both Global Announcements and Course Announcements become easily cluttered. It would be beneficial, especially where Global Announcements are concerned, if we had a way to archive or keep announcements sorted. Three areas: Posted/Live, Pending, Archived.

I would like to see an "Archive" area for announcements, well, everywhere:

• For Students who have seen the announcement but don't want to delete it in case they need to refer back to it later.
• For Teachers who copy courses forward and might want to re-use (the content of) an announcement but do not want them listed/seen by the students in the course.
• For Admins who want to clean up the Campus-wide Announcement Area but do not want to delete the announcements that have been posted. [Especially as the Announcements are now part of the university communication and need to be kept for 5 years. Our current Global Announcements area has about 30 "old" announcements cluttering the page.]

Posted/Live

This would be the area where announcements that are within their open and end dates would be. Once the end date has passed it could move to Archive.

Pending

It would be helpful on all announcements to see a "Pending" label for those that have been created but not actually sent/posted (globally or in a course). It would be nice if these could also be editable.

Finally, in the Global Announcements area, it would be nice if the announcements could be collapsed and just show the title and the open and close date. Currently, the entire announcement, for each announcement posted or set to post, appears on the page. This makes for one very long page.

Additional item added on July 205, 2019: Add ability to sort Global Announcements by creation date or posting date. Date sort for both options should be ascending and descending.

[Renee_Carney]

Hi cms_hickss​

There are a lot feature ideas around announcements right now.

This one might be the most similar to what you are looking for? 

I can see the value you recommend in the organization of Discussions by status.  This item will open for voting July 1, 2015.

Here are a few more on announcements, just for fun!

[cms_hickss]

Thank you.

And the Global Announcements area which are not discussions and where Admins post system announcements really has no settings/organization/etc as compared to what is available to the Course Announcements tool. So I'm hoping that with this we can have a few parity items added to that area (Global) as well as a few new organizational options added to both areas (Global and Course)..

[james_vlisides]

I agree.  I used the Global Announcements area for general updates and maintenance for our Users, and over the last year it has become wildly cluttered. 

It would also be helpful to have the ability to edit an Announcement that has been created before it goes out, rather than deleting it and recreating it if there is an error. 

Thanks!

[cms_hickss]

I agree. Especially if the announcement is Pending and not yet Visible/Live.

I can understand the issue with editing Live announcements. User's won't notice a small change or may have already dismissed the announcement. But, being able to Preview and Edit (both New and Pending announcements) before posting would be awesome!

[cms_hickss]

For anyone who is following this Enhancement Request, it is now open for voting. Thank you!

[scottdennis]

This feature idea is now open for voting.

[tdelillo]

I just added another, in case anyone is interested - ​

[ninafox]

Nice idea!  It would probably be a good idea to have a limit on the number of items in archive as storage and organization could become unwieldy.

[cnle105]

This would be a great feature for the announcement page. From a student's view, I would like to have my announcements on stand-by for later purposes. Right now with the only "delete" features, students would be too indecisive as to whether if the announcement can and/or will be used in the future. The "archive" feature will be as handy as it would while scrolling through our mailbox, but we don't know if that mail has a greater use for us later.

[allison]

Susan,

You make a lot of good points in your initial idea that I'd love to unbundle if you don't mind. As always, we're trying to get at the heart of the problem. It sounds like there are problems for students/instructors and a separate set of problems for admins posting global announcements.

For students and instructors:

1. Are users receiving too many announcements such that they clutter up the global dashboard? If so, I'd love it if you could share some of those screenshots with me.

2. Are users confusing course announcements with global announcements or feeling torn between the two?

3. Do users need a better way to save announcements that are important to them and delete or dismiss announcements that no longer apply?

For admins:

1. It sound like admins need away to separate announcements that will be published, announcements that are currently visible to users, and announcements that have passed their end date.

The good news is, we do have plans to address the Global Announcement issues, including making them editable and previewable. I will keep you posted as that project progresses. A bigger issue in mind mind is how we can improve the experience of viewing global announcements on the dashboard. I would love to hear any ideas you have around how we can improve that experience.

Please keep your thoughts coming. This idea has the potential to impact a lot of our users.

Thanks,

Allison