[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  To further develop this feature, it would be nice if Announcements were unpublished on import, meaning the instructor can see them but the students can't. With a "publish button on every announcement, instructors could release announcements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.

[brandon-davies]

Having unpublished drafts of announcements goes beyond just importing last years announcements (though that is an important consideration). As is, if I'm writing an announcements and get interrupted (occurs all too often), it would be nice just to save what I have done and not have to worry about it. As is, if I hit "save" it would send a half written announcement to all my students, or I can not do anything and hope that the web page is still up when I get back to it, or I can awkwardly set a time for the announcement to post.

My comments about voting was not to say that every idea should be implemented. Honestly, I am not sure I think this "suggest an idea and hope that enough people who actually like it read your idea and vote for it before time is up" is really a good idea. My frustration is that this idea did get sufficient votes, has a comment from Canvas indicating that it will be implemented, and more than a year later....nothing. No indication if it will ever be implemented, yet anyone posting this idea again simply gets referred back to this thread. It kind of undermines any confidence that posting ideas and voting on them is at all meaningful.

Certainly, the people on this forum are helpful, and I thank them for that.

[dhulsey]

Yes, I am a bit saddened that we have not seen any movement on the project for announcements that  @peytoncraighill ​ referred to last year. Even a note that this project has been delayed until 2017 to make room for other big projects like the new Quizzing would be nice. As it is, I am sort of feeling like this request has fallen through the cracks and demonstrates the danger of archiving requests with the promise of future development.

[Renee_Carney]

  Idea is currently in Product Radar Learn more about this stage...

[bquinlan]

I do what Jeff does. It takes hours because I have over 50 announcements in each of my distance learning courses. But until they fix this issue, it is the only way to avoid students getting the blast of announcements all at once. I can no believe they haven't fixed this yet. 

[brandon-davies]

Product Radar seems like a step backwards here. Seems to indicate that this important fix has gone from part of a "larger Announcements enhancements effort" to "we have no plans to implement this idea any time soon but we aren't going to kill it outright so users retain some glimmer of hope" (i.e. product radar). My guess is that the way Announcements are currently coded makes implementing this very simple and sensible idea impossible. Thus implementation requires a complete rewrite of how announcements are handled. If this is the case, I wish someone would just come out and say that. Otherwise there really is no excuse for not implementing this idea.

[sbrown2]

I'd love to see this feature. It's a problem when I import a course and all previously saved announcements are automatically published. What I really want, though, is to be able to work on an announcement over more than one work session. Often my announcements involve complex student feedback that is compiled as I grade many announcements. I need to save announcement drafts because otherwise my work is lost if I need to temporarily log off my computer. Keeping them unpublished until complete would do this job just fine. 

[sbrown2]

I meant grade many assignments. 🙂 

[Jeff_F]

I can recall a few times where I had entered a masterpiece of feedback and then accidentally pressed a key which refreshed the page.  Now that I have multiple monitors I am very keen to first write the text in Notepad and then copy into the Canvas Announcement and then apply formatting.   Thinking out loud, an auto save of any draft text would be tres chic.

[lgaughan]

Has this issue been resolved? Seems like you've been working on it for over a year now?

[Renee_Carney]

 @lgaughan ‌

The bummer of the story is that this project never made it through the prioritization.  In the thread above Peyton said that he hoped it would, along with another communications project, but they didn't.  This idea remains on our radar though - as one that we'd like to prioritize in the future.  Follow this idea to get updates when they're available!