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)

[nskapura]

Did this idea die on the vine?

[scottdennis]

Hello  @nskapura ​,

This idea did in fact fail to receive sufficient votes in order to move to the next stage in the voting process. 

Having Announcements display on the course homepage is an idea that comes up persistently but never seems to gain a lot of traction with other users.  Some institutions choose to link to announcements from an html course home page.  Others have even created custom code in order to have their announcements display directly on the course front page.  Most institutions and users seem to come to the conclusion that announcements are not as important in Canvas as they were in other similar systems where, in contrast to Canvas notifications, users had to go into each individual course in order to get info and updates.

That all being said, anyone is free to resubmit the idea for another run.  User priorities change over time and maybe more people would vote for it now.

[Renee_Carney]

This idea has resurfaced at

[christine_mckeo]

 @Renee_Carney ​ -- This idea ^^ seems to be restricted -- any way to open it up?

[RobDitto]

Personally, I call 90 votes a lot of traction! Announcements desperately needs some Product love, and the comments by  @peytoncraighill ​ gave me some hope last year.

[dhulsey]

I agree, Rob. A quick look around the community has led me to conclude that announcements are not receiving any development, and even popular requests about announcements get archived with promises of possible future development or updates in the future. I thought Peyton used to be the product manager for communications, but he seems to be over in mobile now. It would be great to know who the product manager for communications is and what the state of the union looks like for communications. It makes me sad that both conversations and announcements appear to be dormant. Sure, big projects like the quiz overhaul and grade book updates are important, but I spend a lot of time in conversations and announcements too.  

[Renee_Carney]

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

[RobDitto]

In another thread, Chris Ward mentioned that he is currently the Product manager for communications features.

[Renee_Carney]

 @zisaakov ​

Thank you for your feedback.  I think I can help you with a few of your hurdles!

Announcements

While we are not currently working on an announcement page for the homepage, we are currently working on a feature that will display a number of recent announcements at the top of the homepage.  You can find more on this topic in

Custom Menu Option

If I am understand your need correctly, you are correct, Canvas does provide a way for you to add additional menu options to your course.  The solution is called the Redirect Tool, and it is provided as an LTI.  Adam Williams provided a step by step description of using this tool here​.

I hope you find these two resources helpful.  The one hurdle I am not able to help with is the use of the word "modules" in the course navigation menu.  The idea to   was posted in May.  It wasn't very popular at that time, but maybe there were would be a renewed interest now? 

Let me know if you have any further question, Zaur.

[zisaakov]

Hi Renee,

Thank you for this information. Much appreciated. I will modify my

feedback comment accordingly.

Best,

Zaur

On Wednesday, November 16, 2016, rcarney@instructure.com <