advice on announcement section

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SARAHISANDOVAL9
Community Member

Is it possible that students create their own announcements? How can I give them that access?

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Chris_Hofer
Community Coach
Community Coach

Hello @SARAHISANDOVAL9 …

By design, course announcements are meant to be posted by the instructor…not the student.  However, an instructor could create Groups within a course, and then within a given Group where students have been assigned, they can post announcements.  But, that is within the Group…not within the course.  How do I add an announcement in a group?

Sorry I don’t have better news for you, but I hope this helps to answer your question.

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chriscas
Community Coach
Community Coach

Even though I'd 100% agree with what @Chris_Hofer said about the intent of announcements, I do believe it's possible for students to post announcements if they are given the appropriate permissions by your school's Canvas admins.  There is a permission "Discussions - Moderate" that controls the ability to create announcements, and as far as I can tell in my instance it's available to enable for the student role (though I've never tried enabling it for that role).  If that permission is enabled for the student role, it should allow students to create announcements.  Unfortunately there are a couple big drawbacks to this...

  1. The permission also would allow students to create their own discussions, pin/close any discussion in the course, edit other people's posts or even the discussion topics themselves, and see every post in discussions (regardless of other discussion settings).
  2. This change has to happen at an account or subaccount level, which usually means it would affect a large number of courses and not just the one you're teaching.

Given those points, if it's something your school wanted to pursue for all of their courses, I think it's an option.  We have shied away from even letting TAs have this permission though because of the ability for them to edit the discussion topic or what students said in their posts.

I know there is a feature idea on here somewhere about separating the permissions out better so we could let people create announcements without worrying about all of the other things currently bundled in there, but so far we're stuck choosing to give all of the abilities I listed above or none.

Hope this helps a bit!

-Chris

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