No notifications for recycled announcements?!

[bsr]

Every year, I import my Canvas course from the previous year into the new year's shell, and go through the announcements, deleting the ones that were specific to events last year and changing the release dates on the welcome and reminder announcements. This year, I got the following warning upon editing an announcement:

• Editing an announcement will create a notification in the User Dashboard and Course Activity Stream. If you want users to receive the edited announcement via their notification settings, you will need to create a new announcement.

So, this means that students won't get notifications on my announcements if I recycle them from last year?! Has that always been the case?! 

What on earth is the thinking here? This really creates a metric ####ton of extra work setting up a course, to have to recreate every single announcement anew. There's no point in asking students to make sure their notifications are turned on for announcements, and setting up a slew of reminder announcements and timely tips, if the students won't receive the notifications anyway. If this has always been the behavior and only the warning is new, I guess it's no wonder they act like they haven't seen the reminders I've so carefully crafted and timed for them! 

[carolyn_lyons · Accepted solution]

Hi @bsr, thanks for your question. The new warning you received was added as part of the Editing an Announcement Warning (2023-08-02) Deploy. In this case, the workflow did not change, however the warning message you saw now alerts instructors that when an editing an Announcement (including those that were used in a previous course,) users will not receive notifications of the update.  This should help to clarify when your students will not be sent Announcement notifications. 

There is an idea related to this: Add "Notify users that this content has changed" to Announcements, which has been added to an existing theme. I encourage you to add your comments to the idea, as well as Subscribe, so that if the theme becomes available in a future voting period, you will be able to share your feedback. I hope that helps! 

[bsr]

Thanks for the link ... I subscribed, but was not given option to comment, so I'll just telepathically support it in the meantime!

[Chris_Hofer]

Hi @bsr ...

The way I understand the process for voting and commenting now is that the overall Theme will be available for comments at a later time...rather than the individual idea.  The idea is:

[Announcements] Add "Notify users that this conten... - Instructure Community (canvaslms.com)

...and the Theme (linked within that Idea) is:

Improved functionality for course announcements - Instructure Community (canvaslms.com)

Finally, take a look at the section "When are Themes 'Open for Voting'?" in this Guide:

How do Ideas and Themes work in the Instructure Co... - Instructure Community (canvaslms.com)

I hope this helps to clarify things a bit.

[jlmasters]

Can you confirm that this is correct:

I have an announcement that was imported from a previous course. The announcement has not yet been posted- it has a delayed posting for a future date/time. I edit this announcement.

At the future date/time when the announcement is posted, students WILL receive a notification.

[jbeyer1]

If you use the date and time field below the announcement to automatically post the announcement at a certain date and time, then students will get a notification.  It's a little bit of extra work but at least you do not have to copy and paste ect.  

You can also use this feature if you make a major change to the announcement.  I hope this helps.  J