Students not receiving announcement notifications in manually created courses

[jtorresr]

Hello everyone,

I’ve noticed that when I create a course manually in Canvas, students do not receive notifications for announcements. However, when courses are created and loaded through SIS, students do receive those announcement notifications.

Is this expected behavior? Do I need to adjust any specific settings so that students in manually created courses also receive announcement notifications?

Thank you in advance for your help!

[carolyn_lyons · Accepted solution]

Hi @jtorresr, thanks for your question and sorry to hear that some of your students are missing their announcement notifications. It is not the expected behavior that manually created courses would not send announcement notifications.  Students should receive announcement notifications in any course that is published. However, here are a few things to consider:

- Is this happening to all your students? Is it possible that a few students who are not receiving announcement notifications have their settings turned off in their user account settings or Mobile App? 

- If you imported your announcements from another course, have you adjusted the dates correctly to align with the new course? 

- When did you create the announcements? If they were created before the course start date with the "Students can only participate in the course between these dates" setting enabled will not trigger notifications for students.

I hope that helps to provide a few ideas as to why you are seeing this behavior!

[jtorresr]

Thank you, @carolyn_lyons  for clarifying this!

Yes, this issue affects all students in the manually created course. The announcements were created directly in the course (not imported), and they were published after the course was published and within the course dates. Students also have their announcement notifications enabled in their settings.

For their other courses (created via SIS), they do receive announcement notifications normally. I already opened a support ticket a few days ago but haven’t received a response yet.

[carolyn_lyons]

Hi @jtorresr wanted to give you an update that there was a bug identified earlier this week that caused notifications on new announcements to not generate. Based on the timing of your original post, I am thinking the issue you reported was due to this bug. However, it has now been resolved, so should not be an issue moving forward. If you'd like to re-trigger the notification to be sent for the announcements posted during that period, you can edit it slightly and then save, and it should ask you if you want to send a new notification. I hope that helps to close the loop on this! 

[sharon_kitching]

Is it a few students or ALL the students? We find that every now and again a student email ends on a AWS suppression list, and they stop getting notifications. We report this to Level 1 Canvas suport, log a case and they check the logs & remove the student email from the AWS list. We have never worked out what triggers it (thousands of students get their many many notifications without issue, small handful have issues). 

[jtorresr]

Thank you for your reply, Sharon!

In my case, it affects all of the students in the course, but only for the notifications related to this manually created course. For their other courses (created via SIS), they do receive announcement notifications normally.