[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.

[meichin]

Thanks, Renee!  It looks like there are some really great updates there.  Do you know if this one is still on the radar at all?  

https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/10413-announcements-available-dates 

Thanks!

[meichin]

Oh - actually this one too is the one I was really looking for:

https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/9333-start-and-end-dates-for-announcements 

[Renee_Carney]

Hi Mary.

I haven't seen anything specific for those two, but I'll keep my ears open!

[meichin]

Thank you!

[Renee_Carney]

The changes mentioned above are now available in the https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-14284-canvas-production-release-notes-2018-03-10 

[retannenbaum]

Thank you, thank you, Canvas and  @Renee_Carney  for now showing at a glance the "delayed until" date! The only thing that I didn't see in the release notes is, what date will be used for announcement sorting? In other words, if I created an announcement a month ago that is being released today, will it move to the top of the list when it's released? Or will it be listed down with the other announcements from last month, in which case students will likely not notice it?

I posted this as a feature request yesterday; please let me know if you'd like me to delete that one and just move my request over here. Announcements should sort by release date, not creation date

[ProfessorBeyrer]

A similar idea was posted in January 2018 and a helpful community member added a link to this one, which is now three years old. 

https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/10472-sort-announcements 

[nathan_campbell]

I would like the echo the voice of teachers I support here in Brookline, MA, USA and ask for the ability to PIN announcements that are or greater import than others. A pinned area is something that exists in Google Groups and I've found it very valuable in helping me keep important information front/center/easily accessible for users.

[ProfessorBeyrer]

And Canvas already has a "pinned" area for discussions so the code already exists within the product. 

[nathan_campbell]

You're right! I overlooked that fact! I've even used the 'pin discussion' feature!