Announcements page as course home page

[seth]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

  Idea will be open for vote May 5th, 2015 - August 5th, 2015  Learn more about voting...

As an instructor, I want to set the Announcements page in my course as the course home page. Students would see this page first whenever they access the course. Canvas allows a variety of other pages in a course to be set as the home page (activity stream, syllabus, a page I create); why not the Announcements page?

transferred from the old Community

Originally posted by: C. David Frankel
Thank you especially for contributions by: Mick Cunningham, Josh Blumberg

Comments from instructure

For more information, please read through the Canvas Production Release Notes (2017-01-07)

[SethBattis]

In fact, why not be able to set anything that you can link to from the Rich Text Editor in the course structure as the course home page -- announcements, discussions… a particular discussion topic, etc.

[mlattke]

We would love this.  Our virtual teachers have to provide a weekly announcement and end up changing their home page each week, but then the announcement is lost from week to week.  We try to get them to post to announcements in addition to the home page, but that is duplication of effort.

[sgriffith]

The faculty I work with would love this feature! 

[16903]

I would love this feature.  I am an online teacher and I have a hard time getting my students to view the announcements.

[joanna_d]

We have course templates but it would be nice to be able to embed announcements/ announcement banner within the page- i.e. if the announcements page and had a WZSIWYG too.

[christine_mckeo]

 @scottdennis ​, or other Instructure folks -- are you still looking for people to volunteer for user interviews, as you had mentioned on Announcements as Home Page : Help Center ? Thanks!

[scottdennis]

Hi  @christine_mckeo ​, I'm not sure.  Deactivated user​ would know better than I.

June 4th Edit; Adding  @peytoncraighill ​

[christine_mckeo]

Cool - thanks for tagging her!

[mlattke]

As we were looking at our home page template for the fall, it occurred to me that if there was an option for announcements to be the home page, I would want it to be like Syllabus, where you could have a space at the top to put some static information in, and then display the announcements at the bottom.  Or like an announcements widget or feed that you could add to a regular home page. 

As I think about it, that would be nice in general for all the home page options: to be able to add info to the top (like you can with syllabus), so that you can combine the power of the home page options with custom info for your course.

[scottdennis]

That is a great idea, Michelle - one worthy of its own idea submission I'd think.