[Announcements] Need ability to sort announcements by scheduled posting date, including original date after import to new course

[TiffanyStull]

Problem statement:

An instructor reported that it is difficult to reuse announcements from one course to another. After importing announcements into a new course, there is no way to sort them by the dates when they were posted in the original course. Below is the description of the issue.

"I have scheduled announcements for common assignment reminders and typical information I share with students throughout the semester. In the past with Collab [Learning Management System in use prior to Canvas], I was able to sort these pre-scheduled announcements by date. There is currently no way to sort announcement by date [in Canvas], so if an instructor wanted to leverage the same announcements from a previous Canvas site and happened to updated them out of chronological order, they have no way to sort them in the new site. [...] It would make the announcements tool a lot easier to use when pre-scheduling announcements!"

Proposed solution:

1. Announcements imported into new courses should retain metadata of their ORIGINAL posting date, with this date exposed to user roles who have the appropriate permissions to add/edit announcements in the user interface (e.g., Teachers/TAs/Designers), to allow instructors to sort them by that date.
2. Provide a table display option for announcements with sortable column headers, and allow instructors to sort announcements in the following ways (sort options should allow for both descending and ascending sort, ideally with ability for instructor to set/save their preferred default sort order):
   • By Posted On date
   • By original Posted On date (if announcements were imported from a previous course)
   • By scheduled Available date (if announcements are scheduled to become available at specific dates)
   • By scheduled Until date (if announcements are scheduled to be hidden at specific dates)
   • Alphabetically by Title

Ideally, students would also be able to sort announcements by Posted On and Until date, or alphabetically by Title.

Note: I have attached two screenshots showing the other LMS's Announcements display options and the sorting options within the table view.

User role(s):

instructor,student,ta,designer