Announcements delayed past the end of the course: will they go out?

[EdwardPershwitz]

Canvas currently does not support disabling announcements without deleting them. If I don't want to send an announcement but I want to still keep it so I can copy it over to the next semester, there doesn't appear to be a good way to do it. As a workaround, I would set the "delayed until" date to after the course ends, and they didn't go out as far as I know. This worked in the past. With this new functionality of setting "available from" and "until" dates will this still work? I don't want my students to get any announcements after the course ends. Or is there a better way of doing this? Thanks!

[nuscitpkg]

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@EdwardPershwitz wrote:

As a workaround, I would set the "delayed until" date to after the course ends, and they didn't go out as far as I know. This worked in the past. With this new functionality of setting "available from" and "until" dates will this still work?

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This should still work. Even if you make the course available to students after the course end date, the course is in read-only mode for everyone (including yourself).

We have the opposite problem in my institution. Instructors often give general feedback to students about the exams and the course, but they find that because the course is closed, they cannot do so.

[Chris_Hofer]

Hi @EdwardPershwitz ...

Do you have access to a "sandbox" course within your school's Canvas environment?  Many schools allow their instructors to have a separate "sandbox" course where they can keep course content or try Canvas functionality that they don't want to put within their live semester courses until a specific time.  If you have access to a "sandbox" course, you could keep your announcements in this course, and then copy them into your live course(s) as needed.

Do you think this might be a workable solution for you?

[EdwardPershwitz]

Hi and thank you for the suggestion. This may work, but it's cumbersome. I have three separate shells each semester, so I'd need three sandboxes just to keep copies of them, in addition to any sandboxes I might be doing course development in. If changing the announcement date to outside of the course dates continues to work, then this might be an easier workaround. I just don't want any surprise emails to go out to the students.

[Chris_Hofer]

You wouldn't necessarily need to have three separate "sandboxes" just for announcements, @EdwardPershwitz.  (Though, I do agree ... that if you have other course content that you wanted to build and keep separate from other courses, then having three "sandbox" courses might be the way to go.)  If you kept everything in one "sandbox" course, you could make a module for each course, and then make a page for each module...keeping your announcements grouped in those modules...just for organization purposes.  It was just an initial thought I had...which you are free to try.  You could then just copy/paste the announcements from this "sandbox" course to your actual course.  My $0.02 ... for what it's worth.

[EdwardPershwitz]

Update: 

Sadly, Canvas doesn't fail to disappoint. My "stale" announcements just went out today, a week after the course end date. It also let me delete one that still remained delayed until later today, luckily, because had the course become read-only, this last announcement would have also gone out without giving me an ability to intervene.

@nuscitpkg, this should be a welcome news for your institution - it appears that the current Canvas version allows you to communicate with students after the course end date with no issues.

As far as the workaround for my problem, I guess what I can do is delay them until after the next semester starts (e.g., a year out), then after the course is copied to the next semester go back and delete them from the old course. That's more busywork and more things to remember to do, but that would do the job.

Thanks everyone for responding!