[Announcements] Publish and Unpublish Announcements

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  To further develop this feature, it would be nice if Announcements were unpublished on import, meaning the instructor can see them but the students can't. With a "publish button on every announcement, instructors could release announcements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

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198 Comments
lsessions1
Community Member

Please implement this idea.  It is so time consuming for instructors to re-do announcements or to change dates one-by-one!

brandib
Community Explorer

This would be very helpful for instructors who reuse announcements from semester to semester.

smj2134
Community Novice

Hi all - any update on this? Seems this has been bounced around for the last 7 years - it would be so helpful! 

Back to deleting all the announcements I moved over.... 

PegChecchi
Community Explorer

Adding my voice to the chorus. As a designer, I warn my faculty that this is an issue, but it is still frustrating to them when they forget or the course ends and they post dated announcements into 2022 (insert random date) and suddenly it goes out to EVERYONE...sigh...please fix it?

PaulWilliamson
Community Member

Yes, please change it so that announcements rolled forward to the next year are automatically  rolled forward, ideally with the dates updated by one year. This would mean that the announcements appear as saved but 'unpublished' in the new course, but with updated automatic posting dates This would mean that instructor intervention isn't needed unless they want to edit the post dates or update the announcement text prior to posting.

mgebara-lamb
Community Explorer

I really hope we can have both features for Spring 2023 for announcements:

1. A mute button to mute each announcement (Most important!).

2. An option to update announcement dates, when rolled over from previous semester.

Instructure can you update us? Is this something you are looking into? Why is it taking years?

This would really reduce the workload

Thanks

KimGeorge
Community Member

I completely agree! It would save so much time to be able to publish/ unpublish announcements in addition to the delay post feature. 

PegChecchi
Community Explorer

I would love to see this as well - and the option to change the dates for announcements as we do with assignments! It seems like the functionality exists and it just needs to be attached to another section - but I'm not a programmer, so I dunno. But yes! PLEASE make this work more smoothly for faculty! Thanks! peg

JudithFrei
Community Novice

My work in Canvas would be a lot easier if:

1. announcements were in some logical order (date, alphabetical, etc);

2. there was a mechanism to more easily date and time announcements for release (as there is for assignments).

Judy

sherry_kull
Community Explorer

@JudithFrei , I agree with both of your comments. Announcements are pretty clunky to use.