Common announcement to all my classes

(20)
i teach five different classes (classes, not sections! ) and I have an announcement to make to all my classes. Currently, the only way seems to be - make the announcement five times, once in each class.

 

Shouldn't I be able to make it once, for all my classes?

Note from the Community Team: We are aligning this with a very similar idea, https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/6507-post-announcements-in-multiple-courses-at-once" modifiedt....

76 Comments
dtappin
Community Participant

Hey there! I'm new to Canvas and I can tell you that this is a must have feature. Just on our department if our department head wants to communicate to our student via canvas, he has to send all of our faculty a message, then we each have to either generate an announcement and/or start an email to each course separately. If our department had this feature, it would greatly improve our ability to keep students informed on a common platform.

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.

ssmith31
Community Novice

This would be awesome!!  It would save so much time spent copying and pasting!

jeanderson3
Community Participant

Let's make this happen! This seems like such a simple thing. Maybe add a dropdown box to select which classes receive the Announcement. Therefore, instead of writing an Announcement inside the course, write it outside, then select where it goes after that!

kvjansen
Community Novice

This is a great idea.  Kind of rare that one teaches only one course per term.  Being able to propagate announcements would save me a lot of time. 

Right now, I import an announcement from one course to the next.  Of course, Canvas requires opening settings, then selecting import, then selecting the type of import, then selecting....  Well, you get the idea.

bkomanetsky
Community Novice

Would be unbelievably useful and time saving.  A must!

bkomanetsky
Community Novice

This was created 4 years ago!  What is Instructure doing?!?!?!?!?

pimmel2
Community Novice

It is absolutely staggering that instructure has moved on this.  COME ON CANVAS! MAKE THIS HAPPEN!!

corey_ackelmire
Community Novice

Would love an update on this - Canvas in the age of COVID-19 is just underscoring the need to make announcements to all courses at once.

eva_foster
Community Novice

This is really necessary in the online-heavy world we're teaching in during the pandemic. I strongly believe this concept should be fast-tracked to development and rolled out as quickly as possible.

cameron_crouch
Community Novice

Posting announcements to multiple courses, this is a request from five years ago.  I came from using Google Classroom where any announcement or assignment could be posted to any number of courses at the same time. Canvas has some great strengths, but speed and workflow need some help.  Canvas, if you are not going to do this, then just announce that it is not an option.  Five years?  

clamha
Community Novice

In times like this, I see a considerable need for Global Announcements. I have 5 classes, and I need to communicate with them regularly. 

There are several occasions when I want to send out a Global Announcement to all my classes. Here are some examples:

  • System outage - It happened this weekend, and it has prompt this email
  • Deadlines to drop, request P/NP
  • School closures
  • Lab schedules
  • Holidays
  • My availability

Thank you for your consideration,

Carmen

badari_eswar
Community Novice

I can't believe it has been five years already since I made the first

request. This is such an important feature that I am surprised it has been

neglected all these years or even that it was not in the very first version

at all!!

I do hope it gets the attention it deserves.

Thanks.

Cheers...

Ishie...

On Mon, May 4, 2020 at 9:37 AM clamha@ccsf.edu <instructure@jiveon.com>

patrick_lollis
Community Novice

I can't find an adjective to describe what I think or how I feel about your company allowing this simple feature request to lie dormant and ignored for 5 years without implementation. Because of your negligence, it costs me 50 additional mouse clicks to accomplish this simple task: 30 to copy the announcement to my 5 additional courses, and 20 more to clear the notifications that this generates on my own dashboard, so that I don't miss other announcements that might be created by other users. 

FIFTY

Imagine if you had to follow a similar procedure to say, cc an email beyond your own department.

This is maddening:

  1. Create the announcement in one of my 6 courses
  2. Copy the announcement to course #2 [Clicks: 6]
    1. Three dots
    2. Copy to
    3. Select Class Dropdown
    4. Click on the class
    5. OK
    6. Close
  3. Repeat this procedure for 4 additional courses [Clicks: 24]
  4. Clear the notification that my copied announcement just created for course #2 [Clicks: 4]
    1. Dashboard
    2. Course Title
    3. Announcements
    4. Announcement Title
  5. Repeat this procedure for 4 additional courses [Clicks: 16]

I should be able to tick a box on my original announcement to include it in any additional courses that should receive it - without generating a notification for each of them.

While you're at it, the same code you develop for this feature would accomplish creating assignments, quizzes, pages, modules, etc. for multiple courses with very little extra effort. 

This feature set seems central to the efficient use of your product by many thousands of overworked, often-interrupted teachers and professors. Please develop deeper and more efficient cross-course functionality, starting with the simplest thing: announcements.

aroyal9
Community Participant

I'm with you on this, Patrick.  With the increased need to communicate electronically due to the pandemic, it is beyond maddening to have to post to individual courses.  Over the last few weeks, I found your adjectives, but I can't share them here.  We need a built-in solution that is SIMPLE:  if it involves external apps, scripts, batch files, or "1337" programming skills, then I'm out.

Gwinn

kvjansen
Community Novice

Gwinn:

The simplest thing while we wait for Instructure to make a worthwhile product is to use an RSS feed. I'm not an IT geek, but I still found it easy.

I created a blog on tumblr. For each class I teach I set an rss feed in the announcements in Canvas.

Canvas then picks up from https://masterofd1saster.tumblr.com and posts an announcement. If I want Canvas to pick up something I post about the Supreme Court, I add tell it in the feed to pick up on posts that have certain key words in the title of the post.

It usually takes an hour or so for my tumblr post to appear as an announcement in canvas. If you need some help, please e-mail me at kvjansen@svsu.edu.

Have a great summer.

Sincerely,

Ken

aroyal9
Community Participant

Thanks for the reply, Ken.  I really don't have any social media accounts to work with (I had to look up the word tumblr to find out!), but I'm glad you told me about it because it's something I can consider in the future.

At the time that I made my original comment, we did not yet have access to multi-course tools; we now have Qwickly at our institution, but I'm fairly certain that it's a subscription LTI add-on.  It does allow posting announcements to multiple courses simultaneously, which solves my problem, but it doesn't directly address the issue that this capability is not yet native to Canvas (so I think it's still worth pursuing for those who are teaching at institutions that don't have Qwickly).  I appreciate your taking the time to fill me in about using RSS feeds: it makes sense to use that for content-specific blogs (for me, it would be about math).  I'm willing to learn about new technology, but I'm slow to bring things into my courses until I'm sure how it works and how to keep it under control.  :+)

Have a great summer; stay safe, and be well.

Best,

Gwinn

kvjansen
Community Novice

Thanks, Gwinn. I think you're right about unintended consequences of new tech.

I started a tumblr mostly to express my irritation with Delta Airlines, but it made things much easier in teaching. Things went fine for a semester until one of my female students decided to follow me.

It turned out to be nothing. Made no difference at all as far as I can tell, but as a 60 y/o married man, I was briefly panicked.

Best of luck w/ Quickly. It sounds great. Canvas is ok if you bear in mind that Instructure will do the absolute minimum to prevent customer revolts, and they'll do it grudgingly and glacially slow.

Have a great summer!

Sincerely,

Ken

shauck
Community Explorer

great idea

hdicarlo
Community Member

In this COVID time - when all of our classes have been moved to online - This is needed more than ever!  Come on Canvas - another of those 5 year ++ requests. (Like multiple due dates in Discussions) You should be embarrassed.

HD