Is there a way to track if students have viewed my announcements?

[angela_vanbrugg]

Is there a quick way to check how many/which kids have seen my announcements without having to check each individual student's analytics?

[tdw · Accepted solution]

Hi  @angela_vanbrugg ‌,

There's not really a way to check this - and it's not for lack of functionality in Canvas, it's because it's impossible 😕

Basically the reason is this: Users can control their notification preferences.  So you might have some users view it in your course, some get a DM in twitter, others get an email, and others get a push notification.  Some people have suggested some interesting workarounds such as:

• In the announcement specify that students should "like" it to acknowledge they read it
• Use a discussion instead and set it at the top of the module as a prerequisite so they can't access anything else until they access it.

[jason_english]

Other LMS have this as an option, I'm not sure why canvas cant. There actually is a real shortage of information provided by analytics.

[tdw]

Hi  @jason_english ‌,

I tried my best to outline why it wouldn't be accurate above. My assumption for why other LMSs are able to implement it or how they've implemented it is that either 1) they don't have a external notifications like Canvas or  2) the data they're gathering is incomplete.

To put it another way, it could be implemented to show an announcement as "viewed" when a student actually clicks on it and views the page - but because of the reasons outlined above this probably wouldn't actually reflect reality. And speaking as a data nerd - I'd rather have no data than inaccurate data.

That said, there's a a feature idea for just this which I would encourage you to vote on and to comment on to provide your use case https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/4757-track-announcement-views 

[TONY-ROME]

Blackboard® Ultra has this ability. At the very least it can tell you how many students accessed each announcement. The info is conveniently located on the right side of each announcement title as a fraction — number of students who accessed over total number of students. Canvas, being the Ivy League favorite, I presumed they had at least this ability before we transferred from Blackboard®. Makes me miss my old LMS.

[JeffreyBachant]

I hear you. I miss BlackBoard. Seems in many cases for a "how do I do this" question, the answer is in "well, in Canvas no you cannot".  For example, from today, "has Canvas added functionality to layer modules", and, of course, no it has not.  Frustrating.