Is there a way to have Teachers post Announcements to all Sections even if limited in grading for their section?

[EvanDonovan]

Is there a way to have Teachers post Announcements to all Sections even if limited in grading for their section?

Based on my research so far, there is not a way to do this, except potentially through creating a custom role. But the information on custom roles that I could find was unclear about how to do this.

I am especially uncertain because the "this user can only view students in their assigned course sections" is set for an enrolled Teacher on the Course level, not just at the Role level.

Note that our faculty claim that they used to be able to post to all sections, even while limited to grading in one. However, I've tested and they are not able to do it now, and my research suggests that they never would've been able to do it.

It may be that adding posts in the Discussion forum is the best solution since they are able to see all students in there.

[Hildi_Pardo]

Hi, I'm with you -- I think limiting a Teacher to a section (limit this user to only see fellow section users ) would limit a Teacher to only be able to post to those in their section.    But that is an awesome workaround if a general (ungraded) Discussion can be used!  
Do any of the teachers of this course have the full access to all students?    Perhaps someone with Canvas Admin rights could change one teacher (if that is reasonable solution).

[NoahBoswell]

Hi @EvanDonovan !

I 100% agree with @Hildi_Pardo here. I do not think there is a way to allow teachers to send announcements out to other sections if they are restricted to seeing their own only. However... I think allowing the teacher to see all course users would permit them to have access to send an announcement to all students, despite only being in their section.

- Noah

[EvanDonovan]

Thanks to you both for your replies. To clarify, currently in our Canvas, based on my testing:

1) If a single faculty (like our Lead Faculty) is able to see all students, then they can post announcements to all sections. 
2) A forum also works for all students to see it, although I don't think there's a way to get the forum posts to go out to all students via email like announcements. Or is that possible?

Also, we don't currently have general non-week/non-unit based forums in our courses. All our forums are specific to particular units (weeks) in our courses, and are for a grade. So if we used that, we would need to change how our courses were configured.

What you are saying makes sense about how Canvas works, but it is odd that our faculty are saying that they used to be able to post to all sections, even though they were still limited back then to seeing only in their section.

[NoahBoswell]

Hi Evan,

A discussion forum would send the students a notification to their email if they turned on discussion reply notifications in their account's notification settings. So, there isn't a formal answer for that, as it varies from student to student and only sends a notification if they wish to have it enabled. 

When it comes to the faculty saying they used to be able to see all sections... I find that odd. I just verified that teachers are not able to send announcements out to other sections that they are not enrolled in, if they are limited only to seeing fellow course section users. So, unless you originally had all teachers enrolled under their section but didn't limit their access, or if you paired a student information system, that could've changed something temporarily. However, generally speaking, Canvas doesn't usually have that behavior. So, I'm with you, I don't think those claims were exactly accurate. The inbox works the same way, unfortunately, you can only view and message those enrolled in the same section as you.

Unfortunately, I personally don't see another solution aside from allowing teachers to view all sections, or have the students make sure their notifications are enabled, and set up a discussion forum. Unless, it's possible to create a group and put every student in it (teachers are enrolled automatically into it) and seeing if you can put those students together from different sections and sending announcements through the group?

Noah

[EvanDonovan]

Thanks, this makes sense (although is unfortunate for our use case).

We do have an integration of faculty with an SIS (Populi), which is what puts them in separate sections, but then after that we have to limit them to see only their sections manually.

What is strange, though, is that for concluded courses, when I "act as" a faculty, I can see what looks like an option to contact that whole course's students (not just their students). But maybe that's because the course is concluded?

I don't think we could rely on all students having their discussion forum notifications enabled, and they wouldn't want that for all the discussion forums.

I will have to look more into this "group" suggestion you mention.

[NoahBoswell]

No problem, Evan!

Teachers actually don't have access to message students, let alone anyone, in courses they are concluded from (I just had to verify this). That is quite some interesting behavior you're experiencing! I'm 99% sure that behavior isn't intended.

Let me know if the group suggestion works for you, if not hopefully we will find a solution!

Noah

[EvanDonovan]

Hi Noah, thanks for letting me know. Maybe they were showing in the dropdown but couldn't actually be used in practice?

[EvanDonovan]

Also, note I just did more research on options, and have put a ticket through to Canvas Support. I'll update this ticket with what they say.

Thanks everyone for your suggestions!

[dbrace]

Hi @EvanDonovan,

Have you heard anything back from Canvas Support?

Because of using Populi to enroll faculty into the sections in the same course, do you know if anything changed from that end? In theory, something might have happened there if your faculty claim they should to be able to.

I do not have experience with Populi but maybe their enrollment integration changed something with "enrollment[limit_privileges_to_course_section]".  You can check out https://developerdocs.instructure.com/services/canvas/file.all_resources/enrollments for more information about it.

-Doug

[EvanDonovan]

Hi dbrace,

Thanks for checking in!

Canvas Support got back to me, but only to say that it's always been impossible for Teachers who were limited to a certain section to post Announcements to all sections - or even to edit existing Announcements and have them still show for All Sections. (That had been the workaround we wanted to use.)

However, since then, I've looked at a few of our courses, and this seems not to be the case. There were courses in previous terms where our "lead faculty" posted Announcements that were visible to All Sections, even though they were set as "this user can only view students in their assigned course section(s)" from the beginning of the course.

Here is our full workflow (including on the Populi->Canvas integration:

1) We create the initial Section 1 of the course in Populi SIS, and it has multiple faculty in it. Populi syncs it to Canvas.
2) Near the beginning of the term, we make copies in Populi of this section, and move the faculty that are not the "lead faculty" (one responsible for posting Announcements) into those.
3) Populi syncs these changes to Canvas, and then we have to manually cross-list those Sections back into the main Section.
4) In Canvas, we manually change each of the faculty (including the "lead faculty" in Section 1) to see only their course section.
5) All this is completed prior to the start of the term.
6) When the term starts, the "lead faculty" creates Announcements - in terms prior to our current term, these were visible to All Sections, despite them being limited to that section.
7) As of this term, and possibly part-way through this term (maybe about 1 month ago), though, they are only visible to their own section.

This behavior (being limited to one section) was what I've replicated in my tests, and what Canvas has said has always been the case. However, as noted above, that doesn't seem accurate.

Finally, regarding the API documentation you linked, I noticed that for that API call it says, "Users may have other enrollments that grant privileges to multiple sections in the same course."|

It might not be worth us doing this - but is there a different user role (either by default or custom) that we could use to enroll the same faculty in a course by which they would have privileges to post their Announcements to All Sections? Basically, that way, they would have the limitation on grading from their Teacher role, but would have permissions for Announcements to All Sections inherited from another role in the course.

I have the skills to create my own custom roles, if I know what permissions to grant them, and those permissions are available as options. However, since we would have to enroll the people more than once in a course, then, and the non-Teacher role would likely have to be manual, this might be too much work.

So, in conclusion, I have two follow-up questions, if anyone knows the answer to these:

1) Based on what I've described above as our workflow and what I've seen from the past, what might have changed in Canvas to limit Announcements? It can't be on the Populi side, I think, since we limit the visibility manually in Canvas.
2) If there's no other workaround, could a different user role be granted to people manually for the ability to post Announcements to All Sections?

[dbrace]

Thanks for all of the detail, @EvanDonovan.

I wish I could answer #1 for you. The only significant recent changes that I know of related to announcements was the mandated shift to what was referred to as the discussion (and announcement) redesign. Maybe something in the workflow changed related to that.  Sorry that I cannot think of anything more.

For your second question: What comes to mind would be a mix of:

1. sub-accounts
2. sub-account admins
3. custom sub-account admins
   1. allowing certain things (primarily the ability to post announcements to all sections in a course)
   2. not allowing certain things (primarily not having the ability to enter/edit grades)
4. adding the courses to that sub-account
5. giving the necessary user account the custom sub-account admin role

This would obviously require a lot of testing but should be possible.

-Doug

[EvanDonovan]

Thanks - that seems like it would probably be too complex to implement. For now, I'm following up further with Canvas, since I've found two courses where this was possible previously.

It makes sense what you're saying that maybe this is related to a change in how Discussions work, if that impacts Announcements as well.

However, even the Teachers limited to a single Section can post messages to a Discussion that are seen by All Sections.

[dbrace]

You are right, it might be too complex but it is the only option I can think of.

Hopefully Canvas Support looks into it more for you and provides help; especially since you have some courses where it was previously possible and because of the cross-over similiarties between discussions and announcements, even though you seem to have found something off related to that as well.

-Doug

[EvanDonovan · Accepted solution]

Hello all,

Thanks for your suggestions.

Canvas Support told me this used to be possible, but they removed the ability to do it - this is by design, they said.

They did not provide any workarounds with user roles. Their only suggestion was to make the lead teacher able to see all sections, but that breaks our processes, since it means they would get grading notifications for all students.

So we will have to have a document, or hidden page in Canvas, for each course that lists what the Announcements are, and then each instructor will need to post them.