[Notifications] Default notification settings profiles by user role

 

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

79 Comments
ana_mataksiviou
Community Novice

Agreed, we'er also making use of the observer role a lot. It would be great to be able to exempt them from notifications.

ana_mataksiviou
Community Novice

Having a blanket setting notifications for all is actually limiting the usefulness of Canvas notifications. To avoid spam, people will just turn the notifications off. As such, there's an incentive to use other types of communication, and not Canvas. Basically, the notifications feature is not as useful or effective as it could be.

f_latulipe
Community Novice

We are a school and need to monitor all comms proactively. Most schools have email detection /filtering in place with escalation procedures.  Without guaranteed email notification we would need complicated detection and filtering within the canvas platform. Controlling and locking notifications by user role should be optional and configurable by the admin.

GideonWilliams
Community Champion

Would be good to have this as an option especially in the K12 arena. Like many schools we use the calendar to set homework tasks. We also have 1-1 devices and the ability to push out a message to students as reminder is something many of our staff would like to have. It also goes to show that the needs of K12 are often very different from those at college/university from where Canvas takes its roots.

As a trainer, where we have staff in student roles in courses it would also be great to put all training dates in the calendar and have regular reminders...

I like the idea of an additional permission feature as part of a role.

canvas_support8
Community Participant

We would love to have this. It would reduce the learning curve for new users and ensure that they receive essential alerts straight away.

dphelps
Community Member

This needs to happen.  This should be a pretty simple implementation with a huge benefit to admins.  Perhaps the default just needs to changed to the weekly digest instead of the constant notifications.  We create observer accounts for parents automatically from our SIS and parents are being bombarded with notifications that assignments were created and graded.  Some of the parents will never really login to Canvas but their account but we have to have their info in our SIS for emergency notifications.

tbatiuk
Community Member

This single feature would improve SO much in our institution.

joseph_allen
Community Champion

We set default notifications through the API.  This ensures that Parents / observers get "announcements" by default.  Everything else is set to opt in.  We run the API on a periodic basis to ensure that observers always receive these notifications.   Essentially this feature request is asking for a way to do the same thing through the interface, however I would take it a step further and say that it should be 'default', but also run a script to set them on whatever interval the admin chooses.   Otherwise, parents will change these on their own over time and you'll be back to folks missing what the schools deem as important communications.    I'm still waiting on Notification settings by course.   Basically whatever a users settings are across the board, would apply to each course, but a parent or student could modify them on a course by course basis.   When there is so much volume and daily email, unfortunately nothing gets heard.   

f_latulipe
Community Novice

Unfortunately this approach is not  enough for us, as the settings are easily overridden via the UI. 

In our case we don't just need default settings, but rather admin configured notification settings that can't be turned off by the users.

nichole1
Community Novice

I really hope that this gets changed!  We create courses for a lot of older individuals and it would be great if I could just set the default notifications for them.  I don't want to make learning new technology even more burdensome.

Additionally, my staff is worried that any change they make will kick off an unnecessary email to all students.  

This seems like a no brainer, I hope people vote for it.