Notification to Faculty - Globally as Admin

[tmenon]

Hello, 

I'm trying to find a way to enable notifications (assignment submissions)  as part of account level -, so it will be pushed to all the courses. We have many adjunct faculty, who teaches multiple courses, and most of the time, they  do not turn the notification in their course. Is there a away to set-it up as Admin. 

Thank you. 

Thila Menon 

[kmeeusen · Accepted solution]

Hi @tmenon 

Notifications are a Canvas user feature. They are not an account feature, nor a course feature, and are completely under the control of the user. I like it that way!

For me, this sounds like a training issue, and that seems to be an area where too many colleges fall on their faces - training adjuncts. There are key features that every Canvas user should understand, and Notifications are one of them. Start by sending out feature/function - based newsletters or something similar.

You could create a new Idea Conversation for this functionality in this community.

• How do idea conversations work in the Canvas Community?
• How do I create a new idea conversation in the Canvas Community?

Good luck,

Kelley

[BrianLester]

Hi,

Yes, communication preferences is ultimately under the control of the user - but it can be set by admins (though users can reset it).

Essentially this leverages the API's ability to post a call ' as a user' using "&as_user_id="

It's a bit convoluted but here's how it might work

(btw my institution leaves it to the user...which makes sense)

I've tried this for just one student but I think this approach will work for teachers too...

1.For each user you'll need to find the id of the communication channel corresponding to say the institutional email
It may help that seems to be the channel in position 1 for each user (at least for my institution)

GET /v1/users/{user_id}/communication_channels

2.You can see the set preferences for a user with id *User_ID* for channel id *Channel_ID* using

GET /v1/users/*User_ID/communication_channels/*Channel_ID*/notification_preferences

(You'll need user id, type (email), and email address)

Among these I think I see what you need (from my own settings):
{
{
"frequency": "never",
"notification": "submission_posted",
"category": "grading"
},
you'll need to change never to "immediately" or "daily" etc

3. Now with the user ID and approriate communication channel id for each user you can edit notification preferences
Notice that the call includes "&as_user_id="to since these are set by users (the API masquerades as the user and also any user can revert a setting you make using the API)
You'll need to insert *Channel_ID* and *User_ID*

/v1/users/self/communication_channels/*Channel_ID*/notification_preference_categories/grading?&as_user_id=*User_ID*&notification_preferences[frequency]=immediately
*Query Params*

For *Query Params* I might try: grading[submission_posted]=immediately

I usually test using the live API

https://yourschool.beta.instructure.com/doc/api/live

Then I run the calls in postman

Clicking on </> on the left in postman will allow you to automatically generate code in a variety of languages.

Then you can add looping....a single loop over users and each users channel id...

[tmenon]

Thank you  so much for the responses. I prefer each faculty to set-up their own notifications, we will include this as part of training. We just went live on 6/1. Once again thank you. 

-Thila