Allowing students to like and comment announcements

[NicoleJames1]

How do I allow students to comment on an announcement? I do not have the "allow students to comment" box to check when creating my announcement. 

[chriscas]

Hi @NicoleJames1,

If you don't see the option, that likely means your school/institution made the decision to disable the feature for the entire Canvas account/subaccount.  You could definitely reach out to someone locally in the appropriate department (usually eLearning, IT support, or Digital Education) to see if they'd reconsider the decision or not.

-Chris

[SusanNiemeyer]

@chriscas  You would think that this option of deciding whether students can comment on Announcements would be accessible when one actually creates an "Announcement," but it's not. I really wish that the Canvas programmers would fix this design flaw. I think that they just ran out of steam and put the odds and ends under more options. 

[SusanNiemeyer]

You need to go into your Course Settings. Click on "Settings" in the your Course Navigation bar. Scroll all of the way to the bottom of the screen. Look for the words "more options" in tiny blue letters. Click on that. Now, you can a box that says "Disable comments on announcements."

Hey,  Canvas Development Team! I know that I sound like a broken record. However, hiding important functions like this under "more options" is a big design flaw. Nobody can find these options. It's not intuitive. I have explained "more options" countless times to my colleagues and here on this forum.

[chriscas]

@SusanNiemeyer. I agree 100% on the "more options" being so hidden that hardly anyone but admins even knows those are available.  This setting really shoulld eb available through a settings gear in the announcements area itself (like Discussions has).  In this case, I even forgot this was a course-level option as well as an account one, so I just assumed the institution had disabled it completely.

-Chris

[SusanNiemeyer]

Exactly! You're one of the experts here, and even you forgot where to turn this on! So many important functions are hidden behind the tiny blue letters more options.

I think there are two options to fix this:

1. Create a "gear" icon for Announcements and let instructors turn on this function globally for their courses.
2. Add a box for "enable comments" in the options for individual Announcements. It can be placed under the box "allow liking."

I actually would favor Option B as it would give individual control to instructors.

The language should also say "Enable comments," not "Disable comments."  Again, this is sloppy design work. It really is.