"High-priority" option for announcements

[jmv12]

Hello,

We’ve had a few instances where students have told us they did NOT get a very important course announcement sent out students that actually required immediate attention.  I am sure this likely has to do with their personal notifications settings, and I totally understand and support providing options that work best for students in terms of managing their inboxes for run-of the mill announcements.

However, this brings a couple of thoughts to mind….

1. The worst case scenario is a student selecting “Notifications off” for announcements.  It is fair to say that EVERY announcement we send out contains information that for sure needs to be seen by all of our students at some point.  Is there a way to disable this so that students DO NOT have that option?
2. Is there a way to mark an announcement as “High Priority” or some other way to over-ride the personal notification settings and push out any message that NEEDS to go out right away?  I know in Sakai there is that option to send out any message flagged by the instructor as "High-Priority" to ALL students enrolled in that course regardless of their personal notification settings and am hoping there is something similar for Canvas?

I look forward to hearing back from folks about this --maybe there is already an option that we just need to enable in our particular LMS?

Best,

Matt Velkey

Assistant Dean of Biomedical Sciences Education

Duke University School of Medicine

[burkay_ozturk]

I support that idea in principle, but I have reservations.

It is hard for me to judge from the outside, but most cases of this problem I encountered are the direct result of communication creep and eventual overload. Here is an example outside CANVAS: We all get several (sometimes up to a dozen) announcement emails from various offices at our institutions. Most of them are completely irrelevant to us. As a result, people filter out such messages either by using some native email filter, or by mentally ignoring them.

In my opinion, the best solution in those cases is to think about why there has to be non-high-priority announcements in the first place.

Still, this doesn't address part of your problem, which is some students not even seeing the announcements, which I agree is unacceptable.

[chriscas]

I very much agree with the points @burkay_ozturk brings up around this.  I'm not sure there is a one size fits all solution, but we also migrated from Sakai and Blackboard many years ago and we would get complaints from students that their instructors were "spamming" them with too many emails from those systems.

The default settings in Canvas are that students would get an email notification about announcements and conversation messages, so I feel like any student who is not getting those right now actively made a choice that they do not want to receive them.  The question then starts to become one of who should be allowed to override student preferences...  For our institution, that would not be faculty.  What we've heard from students (and faculty and staff) is that there is too much irrelevant communication in general, and that's why they just start ignoring everything, email, canvas, etc...  So, I'm not sure how much an email override accomplishes in a positive way...  One might say something like "well, I tell them to check email", which makes sense but that could also quickly be rephrased to tell students to check Canvas for their course announcements.

Overall, this was a somewhat "big" issue for our faculty for about the first year of our transition to Canvas, but now 10 years later, there really is very little chatter about it.

Personally, I prefer the current system of letting each user pick their own preferences to one where teachers (or admins) can override user preferences on their own.  Like I said, I know it's not perfect, but at least for me it makes more sense.

-Chris

[jmv12]

Thank you for those thoughtful replies.

I completely agree that students should have autonomy with respect to how they choose to receive notifications, and I also very much agree that we should not overload students with messages.

As such, we adhere VERY strongly to the principle of sending out a limited number of announcements and usually send out a single announcement at the start of the week as a digest of what is coming.  This is specifically in response to requests FROM STUDENTS who appreciated getting this sort of information on a weekly basis.

What I am referring to are the very rare, truly HIGH PRIORITY messages (e.g. an important schedule change regarding a mandatory event) that we really need to get out to our learners as quickly as possible.  I feel that we should have an option via our LMS to be able to deliver those messages.  Could we instead just use some sort of class E-mail list or another messaging modality to achieve this?  Sure.  But, it seems that it this is something that we should be able to do via Canvas.

As for the potential for faculty to abuse this and choose "High-Priority" for every announcement they wish to send out...  Sure, that certainly COULD happen, but were that to become an issue then we could act on that administratively with corrective action/counseling with that particular faculty and/or disabling the "high-priority" feature for that particular course if we find that it is not being used appropriately.

All of this is to say that I would prefer having options to best customize/optimize Canvas specific for our needs as opposed to having Canvas decide for us what sort of options we should or should not have.

Best,

Matt