Global Announcements ONLY for active courses

Global announcments are great. However, for k-12 schools, once students have move from the middle school to the high school, they should no longer receive the middle school principal’s global annoucements. We had a series of middle school global announcements that we thought would be sent to only the middle schoolers but learned that anyone at any point, who had been enrolled in a course in the middle school sub-account would receive that sub-accounts global announcment. 

Basically, my request is for Canvas to add a setting to only allow global announcments for courses in ACTIVE terms for sub-accounts and not for all students enrolled in past enrolled courses. This would keep sub-account announcments seen only by those in the sub-accounts. 

  Perhaps there is a simple checkbox that sub-account admins can use when posting a global announcment and choose to send to all courses (past enrollments included) or to just the current active courses. 

Until we have this setting changed, my elementary and middle school principals can not really use global announcments.    But I know Canvas does a great job listening to us users and I hope this is something that would move Canvas forward for all users. 

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

For more information, please read through the Canvas Deploy Notes (2020-06-06) 

37 Comments
21051
Community Explorer

Bradley,

Thank for adding this idea!! Here in Orange County Florida we need it as well!! 

BradMoser
Community Coach
Community Coach
Author

You’re welcome. I think it’s a necessary. Thanks!!

cms_hickss
Community Coach
Community Coach

I would like the option to target users by term (that's the Canvas definition --we use it for course semester identification).

If a user is a student in the Spring 2019 semester but was both a student and TA in Fall 2018, then when I send a message to TAs in Spring 2019 it would be nice if this user did not receive it.

21051
Community Explorer

cms_hickss‌ I was telling someone that this morning!!! love that idea! I would really work for us! I would limit the active users that receive the global announcement. K-12

BradMoser
Community Coach
Community Coach
Author

Love the idea to make it filtered by term(s). Great addition. Share this to your CSM and other Canvas folks so we can make it move in the community and get it implemented. 

BradMoser
Community Coach
Community Coach
Author

Agreed John, I love the idea to have the option of which terms we could push the announcement too. 

benjamin_rodrig
Community Contributor

 @BradMoser ‌
This is a great request. I have up-voted.

BradMoser
Community Coach
Community Coach
Author

Thanks! Now tell others so we can make this thing a reality!! Perhaps before end of this school year?? 

 @sakhtar ‌ can you share this with your other CSMs and we can make some movement here? 

millerjm
Community Champion

This would be very helpful.  We currently cannot use global announcements for some use cases because of the fact that they go to any student who has ever been enrolled in that subaccount.  We only use them at the global level. 

For example, our Dean of Business wants to send emails every term to all business students.  If he sent them as a global announcement to all students enrolled in courses in the Business subaccount, he would be sending them to students who took ONE business course 5 years ago.  So, instead we have had to set up a canvas course and a process to enroll all students enrolled in business courses so that he can send them announcements and inbox messages. 

Having the ability to send these announcements to only a given term (or several terms at once, like choosing selective students to release a quiz to) would be extremely helpful and make these global announcements work as they need to. 

While you are voting on this feature idea, check this one out too! 

https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/13092-remove-global-announcements-from-settings 

kmeeusen
Community Champion

When I first looked at this feature idea, I thought "so what"! But the more I think about it, the more I like, and more reasons why it would be useful.

The only other possibility would be some convoluted method of turning off notifications (fundamentally opposed to messing with a user's only true area of control), deleting past users (what a mess that would be), and other tedious options to control who does not see or get notified of an announcement.

Kelley