[Notifications] Default notification settings profiles by user role

[seth]

As an account or subaccount admin, I want to set default notification settings for my users by role. Like role-based permissions, these notification settings could be locked or unlocked; that is, I could choose to allow users in a given role to change a default notification setting or not.

transferred from the old Community

Originally posted by: Kurt Beer
Special thanks for contributions by: Pamela Wik-Grimm, Simon B. Walker, Tricia Jackson

[tross]

I am sure it is different in a Higher Ed world but in K12 we still have the 'click it just because you can' mentality.  So we have students who don't even know that they did turn off notifications but they did.  Giving an institution the option to lock some settings would be huge.  

[jbrady2]

Having read the many comments posted here, I can definitely understand why certain institutions, especially K-12, might want to have this option. It makes sense to me, in this instance, to provide the option, let the individual institutions decide, and hope that the power is not abused.

[zmitroni]

This would be fantastic!!

[creitan]

It never ceases to amaze me how varied our students are and what it takes to get them to enter the course. Even after orientations where they are shown in person exactly what they need to do, they are still looking for short-cuts.  Teaching a blended/hybrid course this semester, there are many assignments, activities,  and content pages that students need to do and study in order to get what they need to succeed in the class. I was astonished to learn that some students had turned off all notifications (perhaps because they were overwhelmed by notices at the start or the semester) and were not checking the content modules, or the announcements, and were just going to the gradebook to click on things that gave them points. By doing this, they would miss prompts for assignments that needed to be turned in during class.  I think that forcing certain notifications would definitely help us get students doing what they need to do- or at least help us notify them that they're missing something. What they choose to do after notification is always still up to them. 

[dwillmore]

This is our greatest need case.

[dwillmore]

I think you could still set the default notifications to optimum settings and allow users to change those settings as they wish.

[Nancy_Webb_CCSF]

 @kmeeusen , I disagree with your analogy; a social media site is not the same as a classroom.  Yes I wouldn't want any site I voluntarily use to send me unwanted notifications.  But a classroom is different - a teacher has the right to get the student's attention for important messages.  I wouldn't question my employer's right to contact me either.  Our instructors are used to having a news forum where they know students will receive an email and are quite upset at not having an easy way to contact students, for example with a message that the class is open and how to log in.

[kmeeusen]

That's cool  @Nancy_Webb_CCSF  , and we can agree to disagree.

I teach adults, and I do believe they have that right. And, setting up notifications, validations, mandatory responses and all those other tools never really assures that students actually read any communication a teacher sends.

Kelley

[a_craik]

The debate of student liberty / spam control is certainly an interesting one, but I'm voting this up for a different reason - the UK HE requirement of "External Examiners".

As part of the quality assurance process here in Blighty, academics from other universities are contracted to validate the standard of the credit bearing assessments we conduct, including the nature of the assessment and (a sample of) the marking of it. We have therefore introduced a Canvas role type called "External Examiners", primarily in order to give them access to view the marked assignments at the end of the 'course'. Of course, these External Examiners are enrolled onto the courses they cover in advance for practical reasons (i.e. well before the administrators get very busy preparing for all those marks to be ratified in boards!).

As you can imagine, this role type doesn't need any notifications switched on. As many are experiencing Canvas for the first time they are essentially getting spammed by all those course announcements that are so valuable to the students, and we don't have a way to turn anything off for the External Examiners.

So setting different levels of default notifications per role (at least initially - user should always be able to amend them to a degree IMO) is needed both to smooth our transition to VLE-based external examining practices (god forbid we should revert to emailing / posting samples of assignments again!) and to enable tailored, versatile and considerate approaches to digital communications in a world of email-saturation.

Please join me in voting this one up

[jonesn16]

I agree with  @kmeeusen ‌. Users should be able to control how they receive notifications. Its a Red Queen's race - some faculty bombard their students with announcements, so students start to ignore announcements. Then faculty want to force all their announcements to also generate an email. Students learned to start ignoring emails. If we force the students to receive certain notifications... the end result will be students learn to ignore notifications. I agree with  @dwillmore ‌ that customizing the default settings would be helpful.

However, instead of a continuous arms-race about being in students' faces, we should design our courses so that the onus of organization is built into the static components of the course, not on a student getting pinged at the right time. To expand on  @Nancy_Webb_CCSF ‌ 's comparison, I agree that a teacher has the right to a student's attention in the classroom. That teacher wouldn't have the right to call them at home to remind them, or text the student whenever they wanted.