[Announcements] Announcement Area ReDesign

Right now both Global Announcements and Course Announcements become easily cluttered. It would be beneficial, especially where Global Announcements are concerned, if we had a way to archive or keep announcements sorted. Three areas: Posted/Live, Pending, Archived.

 

I would like to see an "Archive" area for announcements, well, everywhere:

 

  • For Students who have seen the announcement but don't want to delete it in case they need to refer back to it later.
  • For Teachers who copy courses forward and might want to re-use (the content of) an announcement but do not want them listed/seen by the students in the course.
  • For Admins who want to clean up the Campus-wide Announcement Area but do not want to delete the announcements that have been posted. [Especially as the Announcements are now part of the university communication and need to be kept for 5 years. Our current Global Announcements area has about 30 "old" announcements cluttering the page.]

 

Posted/Live

This would be the area where announcements that are within their open and end dates would be. Once the end date has passed it could move to Archive.

 

Pending

It would be helpful on all announcements to see a "Pending" label for those that have been created but not actually sent/posted (globally or in a course). It would be nice if these could also be editable.

 

Finally, in the Global Announcements area, it would be nice if the announcements could be collapsed and just show the title and the open and close date. Currently, the entire announcement, for each announcement posted or set to post, appears on the page. This makes for one very long page.

Additional item added on July 205, 2019: Add ability to sort Global Announcements by creation date or posting date. Date sort for both options should be ascending and descending.

Added to Theme

57 Comments
meichin
Community Participant

I am thankful for the updates to announcements. Thank you Canvas team!

The thing that we are still wishing for, however, is an end date, and an option to filter or sort.  The list becomes really long...I copied this nice feature from admin announcements to note that the technology is there somewhere!

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Admin announcements are missing the filter/sort option, though.  The scroll down to get to the spot to add or edit an announcement is about a mile long right now.  At the very least, switching to sort from latest to earliest would help!

RobDitto
Community Champion

 @meichin ‌, I agree and would suggest that this could be presented similarly to availability From/Until dates in several other Canvas features.

Renee_Carney
Community Team
Community Team

The Radar idea stage has been removed from the Feature Idea Process.  You can read more about why in the blog post Adaptation: Feature Idea Process Changes.

 

This change will only impact the stage sort of this idea and will not change how it is voted on or how it is considered during prioritization activities.  This change will streamline the list of ideas 'open for voting', making it easier for you to see the true top voted ideas in one sort, here.

jeremy_stevens
Community Contributor

We would greatly benefit from a user-facing archive for global announcements.

From a student and staff perspective, it would be good if they could clear global announcements from their dashboard, but have a link to view an 'archive' of all global announcements they have received in the past.

leturno
Community Participant

Global Announcements sort wrong. They should sort newest first.

Along with this redesign can we have a feature to reverse the date order or at least put most recent announcements first.  Now you have to scroll through all ancient announcements to see your most current announcements and to access them to edit them.

meichin
Community Participant

"Global Announcements sort wrong. They should sort newest first."  Amen, Brother. That alone would be such a time saver for us admins.

cms_hickss
Community Contributor

I just wish they sorted by posting date and not creation date.

Because I have a couple of semesterly posted messages that get built out a year in advance and I have no clue what page they're going to be on should a change need to be made. Smiley Happy

cms_hickss
Community Contributor

And, I've updated the Idea to include a sort functionality.

nfisher
Community Participant

Greetings! I was instructed to add on my feature idea with yours since they both deal with organization of Global Announcements. 

Often times we reuse certain communications throughout the years and we have to thumb through pages and pages of posted announcements to find the one we need. The global announcements page has absolutely no organization to it, the dates do not fall in order of any kind and there is no alphabetical organization either. My top suggestions are:

1. A way to organize them by posting date, etc. would make the view much easier to read through.

2. If there was a way to type in a keyword to find an announcement quickly, that would be a tremendous help!

3. If there was a way to add our own tags when we create an announcement and then sort by that tag, it would also allow us to find what we need must faster.

Thank you for the collaborative effort.

michael1439273
Community Participant

Hello Canvas Community,

   I could not agree more with cms_hickss. Her suggestion, if "completed", would make the announcements tab much easier to use and organize. 

   I also have a similar idea, but it needs your support

Please read View All Announcements on One Page and put your vote in. Smiley Happy

Thank you, 

- Michael A.