Permission for Observers - Uncouple Discussions and Announcements

[f5098c8e76d7c2c]

  This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

  Idea open for vote Wed. January 6, 2016 - Wed. April 6, 2016  Learn more about voting...

As a K-12 institution, when we were setting the parameters of the observer role for our parents, we were obliged to disable the ability to see discussions to protect our students' privacy.  Unfortunately, disabling discussions also prevents our parents from being able to see the announcements our teachers and counselors post.  Many of these announcements are meant to be seen by both students and parents.

An improvement would be uncoupling discussions and announcements within the permissions settings so that an institution can choose to disable/enable each feature individually as needed.

  Comment from Instructure

For more information, please read through the Canvas Production Release Notes (2016-03-12) .

[joseph_allen]

Matt,

Our district discovered the Announcement / Discussion discrepancy for Observers back in mid-November and worked with Canvas to help move this along as like many others, we believe it is critical for Observers to see Announcements.  That said, we have shut off Announcement comments as a default for all Canvas courses through an API job.  We received feedback from teachers and school administrators that when they make an announcement, they generally don't want students to comment back. It is something a teacher could re-enable if they want. So for us, that took the privacy issue for Announcements off the table.

[joseph_allen]

Thank you Canvas team for getting this done so quickly.  This is a very important feature to our K12 district and probably many others.  Great job!

[MattHanes]

The extension for this idea is now ready for voting:

[Renee_Carney]

Thank you to f5098c8e76d7c2c7d17160987716a92d171a4c57b7ea2caf08b13d5bca2d5ac5 for submitting this idea, as well as,  @MattHanes ​,  @KristinL ​, S9300807​, lalevesque​,  @sadenniston ​, ajbaylis​,  @mgsmith ​, LisaCasto​,  @joseph_allen  for your contributions. Your investment in this idea helped refine a feature which is now part of Canvas!