Announcement settings shouldn't be in course details

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You should be able to set how many announcements are visible in a course, the ability to disable comments, and if announcements should show up on the homepage from the actual options settings of an announcement. It shouldn't be in course details, it's hidden and difficult to find and not at all intuitive. 

5 Comments
Stef_retired
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni
Status changed to: Open
 
SusanNiemeyer
Community Contributor

I'm a community college professor, and I taught myself Canvas when the pandemic started. Now I mentor my colleagues.

One issue that comes up again and again is that two important options related to Announcements are buried in the Course Settings under "more options." These are: 1) Show recent announcements on Course homepage and 2) Disable comments on announcements. Without being told where to find these options, instructors can't find them. 

Here's the fix. When instructors click on Announcements, add the three little dots next to the blue rectangle that says +Announcement. Put these two options there. That's the logical place.

One of the major problems with Canvas is that it's often not intuitive, but the good news is that this problem is very easily solved.

mwolfenstein
Community Participant

This is one of several settings that is absolutely mystifying in terms of its placement (see also all of the grades related settings that are on the Settings page). Like Gradebook, Announcements has its own settings on its own page, and that's definitely the intuitive place to put the settings related to that feature rather than buried beneath a rather non-obvious button on the settings page.

SusanNiemeyer
Community Contributor

Thank you, @mwolfenstein.

Everything hidden under "more options" should be relocated. Everything!

Announcements go to Announcements
Grades go to the Gradebook
Discussions go to Discussions
Groups go to People

Done!

It's like the Canvas programmers just had a lot of loose ends and got really, very lazy. "Let's just hide really useful functions under 'More options!'"

Canvas must be made more intuitive. I'm sure that any of the programmers could figure out how to move these items to the right places, and I'm not sure why they done so yet.

ProductPanda
Instructure
Instructure
Status changed to: Archived
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