[Announcements] Marking all announcements read

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas LMS

In the student interface, currently it is not possible to select multiple or all announcements to make them marked as read. As a result, often times a student's announcement thread will fill up to the point that they will no longer be able to notice when an instructor sends out an announcement, thus creating the possibility of a student missing out on something important. 

53 Comments
ynthrepic
Community Member

@samueldy Thank you for those insights. I honestly don't know if that's better or worse. It still doesn't explain why such elementary feature improvements like this cannot be made.

Certainly, it does give me some sympathy for the pressure the devs must be under, but certainly none for the executive team, who should have made the call to move platforms long ago, as soon as they anticipated this kind of growth.

michael1439273
Community Participant

It would be awesome if there was a mark all as read when I'm looking at announcements.

StevenLercari
Community Novice

I would love the ability to mark things as read, or simply delete, from the main screen under "Announcements". The info comes to my email so it's redundant to have to open each individual announcement in Canvas as well. Honestly, it's just annoying.

c_murphy
Community Participant

We've just run our annual student survey and being able to tick all announcements as read was one of their top priorities. Having to tick them individually as read is a huge nuisance and seems a basic feature that should be implemented ASAP. It makes Canvas annoying for our students because they get emails of the announcements as well as seeing them in Canvas.

chocolatelizard
Community Member

Hi all. Seeing that Instructure puts students and educators last and has refused to even so much as acknowledge this long-standing issue, I have found a work-around.

If you use Google Chrome, go to the Google Chrome Web Store (where you download various extensions) and download the "CanvasTools" extension. In addition to many other added features, this extension adds a "Mark all as read" button to your Canvas inbox. Thank goodness.

Hope this helps. I also hope the "programmers" who work for Instructure find a cockroach in their bathroom tomorrow morning.

celiaecc
Community Explorer

This feature would be very helpful in both student and instructor views. I have courses with multiple instructors. Some end up marking each one then deleting them in bulk not realizing it removes them for everyone. Having a Mark as Read feature would help this problem. 

atschrag
Community Explorer

Please please please make “mark all as read” an option for announcements for both instructors and students! This seems like a basic feature that should be available to help us manage the myriad alerts and notifications on the site, especially since most students view these announcement via email first. 

vcaston
Community Member

This is a problem in the instructor web interface as well.

You have checkboxes next to each announcement, but no way to check them ALL, or to apply an action like MARK AS READ, only "delete."

Isn't this a common feature of most email browsers and other lists?

Victor Caston

University of Michigan

EddieH
Community Novice

Going on four years and this STILL isn't a thing.  How?  I have yet to see any reason why I can't select multiple announcements to mark them all as read. 

KristinL
Community Team
Community Team
Status changed to: New