[Announcements] Post announcements in multiple courses at once

[bonnie_le]

I would like to see a feature in Canvas that allows you to create an announcement then choose multiple courses  in which you would like to see the announcement posted.  The current process is time consuming and tedious; you create the announcement then open each course and copy and paste it into each separately.

Note from the Community Team: We are aligning this with a very similar idea, https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/2703-common-announcement-to-all-my-classes

[jwadec]

We bought a Qwickly course tools license for all of our faculty so that they’d be able to post announcements to all courses for a given term at once. It has come in handy. I completely understand wanting Canvas to handle this natively, though!

[ssullivandc]

Welcome to canvas. Time consuming and tedious.

Simple things that should be obvious like selecting multiple assignments at once and moving them all together into a group, for example, are not possible. Sending an email to students in multiple sections, the aforementioned announcements, etc.

Dr. Stephen Sullivan

Professor, Anatomy & Physiology

Bucks County Community College

[kvjansen]

Let's face it, Canvas does the absolute bare minimum to jumping ship and trying a database that actually works.  Voting is just a scam to set customers against each other.  Would you buy a Toyota if they made you vote on whether your Camry should have seats?

The easiest way to post a single announcement across multiple courses is to start a blog on, e.g., Tumblr.  Then set up an RSS feed in the announcement section for each of your courses.  You can tailor the feeds so that Canvas only picks up the ones pertinent to your course.  I teach Criminal Justice, so I have one feed in which the title is "CJ current events."  Another is "CJ court watch."  Anytime I post with those words in the title, Canvas will add those as announcements in each course in which I have a feed.

[cms_hickss]

We've had a request for this as well, but not as often as it seems others do. If this should get added to the system, questions that need to be taken into account:

• Where will this multi-course announcement live
• Can you edit an individual announcement in a single course if it was created as a multi-course announcement
• Can you delete an individual announcement in a single course if it was created as a multi-course announcement [ie, you accidentally posted it to courses A, B, and D and it was really supposed to go to A, B, and E]
• Can you add another section to a multi-course announcement [ie, you accidentally posted it to courses A, B, and D and it was really supposed to go to A, B, and E]
• Who (teacher, ta, course designer) can create a multi-course announcement AND for a TA do they need to be enrolled in all the courses or just one
• Will all the settings be available  AND if so, when allowing for student responses will they be locked to just one of the courses or will response from all of the courses be seen by all of the students

[timothy_johnst1]

Apparently Indiana University has created a local tool to perform this multiple-course announcement task:

Post announcements to multiple Canvas courses 

Multicourse Announcements, a locally developed tool available in Canvas, allows instructors to post an announcement to multiple courses at the same time. The option to create an announcement for more than one course will automatically appear in the Canvas Announcements tool for all Indiana University courses. If for any reason it does not, instructors can add the tool to the course navigation menu in any Canvas course site to access the same functionality.

[david_white]

Oh that would delightful!  I wonder if we could prevail upon the IU folks to make that code available for distribution?

[profesaalfeld]

I would love this feature. It is tedious to import or copy/paste to all of my classes.

[TheatreTeacher]

I am curious...why is this feature taking so long to get added.  It seems like an obvious tool that should already exist and the earliest requests for this were in 2016.  Please help explain the process so we know how long this may take,  Thank you so much!

[MrsBabik]

Hello

Please add this as an option to Canvas!  As a School Counselor, I have grade level courses and would love to be able to create announcements that I could pick which grade levels to add.  

[toole_anya]

Hi Instructure! Please add this feature to Canvas! I have 10 courses and need it for all "umbrella" announcements I have to post in them. I have to do it 10 times now and would love to save time. 

It has been a request since 2016, seems like a fast feature to add considering that Indiana University were able to add that feature themselves.

Thank you!