[Announcements] Publish and Unpublish Announcements

[dhulsey]

I love that Canvas can bring over announcements when I copy content from another Canvas course. This keeps me from copying and pasting announcements I make every semester.  To further develop this feature, it would be nice if Announcements were unpublished on import, meaning the instructor can see them but the students can't. With a "publish button on every announcement, instructors could release announcements quickly when they are needed without the tedious setting of a date and time on each announcement.

This feature would also bring announcements in line with other tools in Canvas that use publish and unpublish functionality and would help instructors who might unintentionally be releasing announcements to students from a past semester.

[pmccloskey]

Absolutely need this functionality in announcements.  And I agree-  I wish that when I look at the list of all my announcements I could easily tell a) if it has been published/sent yet or not b)what date it was sent and c) what date it is scheduled to send. 

I use announcements as an integral part of my teaching and right now using it is tedious when I import, but also daunting to start from scratch each quarter.

[kwennstrom]

Wow, I'd vote for this ten times if I could . It would be sooo helpful.

[dl-smalott]

I wish that when I look at the list of all my announcements at a glance I could easily tell a) if it has been published/sent yet or not b)what date it was sent and c) what date it is scheduled to send.

[dbarr3]

I think this is an excellenta suggestion but what might be even easier to do is to just allow the opportunity to have a "turn off" date when you set up a delay posting date. This way when you transfer the course it would already be turned off and faculty can just change the dates when they are ready for it.

[dbarr3]

All of these ideas would be great, but from a programming perspective I am wondering if adding a "end date" box might be easier. If it has "ended" then maybe it would gray out which would indicate it is no longer visible. Not sure.

[dbarr3]

I think the easiest way to solve the problem is to add an end date box. If you add that it will end and then not be visible to current students or those that come in the new semester until someone changes the date. Just a suggestion.

[cms_hickss]

If have end dates on our Campus-wide announcements, but from the Admin interface it doesn't matter. All the announcements show all the time. There is no collapsing them, no way to mark them as posted or pending release. Right now it is one very long, scrolling page (and that's just after two years).

I'm hoping that if they can cleanup the "course" announcement area that some of those changes will also make it up to "Global Announcement" area.

That said, I would love to see Course Announcements have both start and stop date and time (instead of just the delayed posting date and time).

[peytoncraighill]

Thanks for the feedback, everybody!

We'll likely cover this request in workshop next week, and I'll report back afterwards.

[charles_woolum]

My apologies if this has already been asked, but has there been any discussion or thought into adding duration lengths to Announcements? By this I mean, I know we can already delay announcements from being published until a certain date, but it would be beneficial to have an option to set a date for an announcement to un-publish automatically as well. I have found that instructors in some instances don't like the idea of having to go in and manually 'hide' an announcement.

[peytoncraighill]

Hope everybody's fall start is going well!

Quick update: This idea has been added to part of a larger Announcements enhancements effort, which is second in communications priority to Conversations (i.e., Inbox) enhancements. We are in the process of capacity planning for 2016, so stay tuned for additional updates.