Display most recent announcements on a Page

[nathan-swailes]

  This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

     

  Idea open for vote Wed. August 3, 2016 - Wed. November 2, 2016  Learn more about voting...

Having set up an informative home page that displays all the important course information when students open the course, the only thing that is missing is the most recent announcement(s) displayed. A small horizontal widget bar would be ideal and could be placed under the course title or at the top of the page.

Announcements are vital to the running of a course, reminding students of a  room change, to bring something with them to a certain session etc. While they can subscribe to receive announcements to their email or subscribe to the rss feed (which are both encouraged), it would make so much sense to have the most recent important announcement appear on the Home Page too. This most recent announcement would be visible immediately to all users when the student opens the course, without having to navigate to the announcements page.

I have tried displaying the announcement RSS feed in an iframe on the home page, which seemed like the perfect solution, but unfortunately Chrome and Firefox (not sure about Safari) don't automatically support this without add-ons - only IE does. So that wont work for 95% of students.

I am certain students would find this useful and instructors would feel much more confident that their most recent message is reaching everyone if it is front and center, regardless of whether a student forgot to visit the announcement page or did not subscribe to an rss feed or email announcements visit the announcement page.

Maybe there is already a widget out there that I am missing that will fill this gap. Or other solutions or ideas out there to solve this?

Comments from Instructure

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

[rkelley1]

Link to video on YouTube​

Here's a 4 minute "walk through" for adding announcements to your Home Page (using the Feedwind widget).  It has a few modifications to the above directions, to create a better result.

[Stef_retired]

 @rkelley1 , this is a very helpful resource! I'd hate to see it get lost, residing as it currently does in the comments section of a feature idea, which doesn't make it readily searchable. Would you be willing to take a few minutes to create a new stand-alone document in one of the group spaces, say in the Instructional Designers​ group? You could then share it out to any other group of which you're already a member--and if you're not yet a member of the ID group, just navigate to the home page of the group and select Join Group from the Actions menu at the upper right, which will allow you to create content within the group.

[rkelley1]

I just added it to the instructional designers group.  I hope to hear back from others how it works for them.

[cward]

By the way, this feature request is currently in QA with the Canvas engineering team. We probably won't make the 11/19 beta release, but know it's a rapidly forthcoming course feature (no workarounds needed)!

[Stef_retired]

Thank you for doing that,  @rkelley1 ! For those interested, the link to the new resource is here: Adding Announcements to the Home Page

[kmeeusen]

 @rkelley1 

This is powerful! I just test this is two courses in the same account using the Announcements in just one course, and it worked. Then I tested it in courses in two separate accounts (yes, I actually have 8), and it worked! I suspected it would, but needed to test it.

One disclaimer to add - if the course is not published when you capture the RSS feed code, then Feedwind cannot create the widget.

Thank you! This is going to be very helpful for my faculty!

KLM

[nathan-swailes]

I can't wait to add this to my courses Deactivated user​ thanks for keeping us updated and for listening to our ideas! Very excited about this feature! Cheers!

[nathan-swailes]

Yessssss!    

[kmeeusen]

One more request Robert................

Can I add this to our CanvasHacks course at resources.instructure?

kLM

[Renee_Carney]

  This idea has been developed and is On Canvas Beta How do I access the Canvas beta environment?

For more information, please read through the Canvas Beta Release Notes (2016-12-19)​

Discuss this new feature, and others, in the Beta Release (2016-12-19) Collaborative Chat