[Notifications] Default notification settings profiles by user role

 

As an account or subaccount admin, I want to set default notification settings for my users by role. Like role-based permissions, these notification settings could be locked or unlocked; that is, I could choose to allow users in a given role to change a default notification setting or not.

 

transferred from the old Community

Originally posted by: Kurt Beer
Special thanks for contributions by: Pamela Wik-Grimm, Simon B. Walker, Tricia Jackson

79 Comments
ahayson
Instructure
Instructure

 @rthornton ‌,  @tori  and  @greg_dabelstein ‌

I know this feature highly interests you all based off of our recent conversations. I would highly recommend voting and following this item. I hope this is helpful! please vote Smiley Happy Smiley Happy

- Am

greg_dabelstein
Community Participant

Yep, as a teacher/admin it is really impoprtant that we are able to not only change the notifications but also lock them down so that (younger) students can't opt out. If they can turn off notifications there is always the possibility of them using the 'but i didnt get it' excuse....

rthornton
Instructure
Instructure

Thank Amelia!! I love this!

ward_michael
Community Participant

We will really miss the Default Notification Settings we were using with Blackboard.  At our institution, we prefer the Opt-in choice for students to sign up for the notifications they prefer so we are not spamming them with so many emails.  Canvas appears by default to send so many emails and only provides an Opt-out option for students.

It is unfortunate that Canvas does not offer the same system level control over course notifications that Blackboard offers.

With Blackboard, it was very easy to set the defaults for course notifications.

I took a look at the Canvas Notification Preferences API. 

Notification Preferences - Canvas LMS REST API Documentation 

The problem with it is that there is no “sticky” feature.  We typically run all of our user accounts through SIS in case there are any user updates.  With Canvas it looks like we would have to then keep track of any previously imported users so we did not override the user’s notification preferences if they decided to change them.  What was fairly straightforward with Blackboard is much more complex with Canvas.

Perhaps being able to set Default Course Notifications settings like Blackboard does might be a good idea to add to Canvas in the future?

c_murphy
Community Participant

As a new Canvas user, we are very surprised that this feature isn't in place and would very much like to see it! Default notification settings provide a baseline and we all know that often students don't change their settings right away, if ever, so it is really important that we have some control over the initial settings. 

Steve_25
Community Participant

We're K-12 and we did exactly what you described and used the API to modify user notification settings to a default and  continue to enforce some minimums every night. That does, as you noted, require a database to keep track of which users have been seen and defaulted in the past, but since we have various servers running all the time anyway it didn't seem too much trouble to stick a MongoDB database (the script is written in node.js) on one of them and poke some values in. Nobody has ever asked why their notifications turn back on every night, even if they turn them off haha! Probably should remove the button for turning them off in the custom css...

We're now able to use the internal messaging system with confidence, and I'd have to say, adoption among our teaching staff has been swift (we've been running like this for a year now). This coupled with another customisation we developed to allow picking out the observers of students means teachers can lookup students, hit our include observers button and shoot off a message without needing to find the matching parent emails etc.

The open API is a wonderful thing, that said inbuilt solution to this issue would be nice. It would be possible to implement what we have done elsewhere using our script, however it's a bit of work to implement. 

spiros_loukopou
Community Novice

Excellent idea to bring to vote!

It cannot be overstated how important it is to manage what notifications students need vs. what they receive . It's a real sticking point for faculty who wish to manage the talkativeness of their pages and not divulge every last detail of an updating spree or wikipage edit.

I sincerely hope this makes it into the production queue.

Cirrus
Community Participant

Great idea. I do like it by role, that way you could default turn on certain notifications for students (announcements, messages, etc) but not for certain admins. My SIS guy doesn't care about account level announcements, nor should he need to. I don't think we would lock them in a higher ed situation, but I could see places you would want to. I would love to see an interface like the one for permissions with on/on and lock/off/off and lock for each notification by role, and then maybe a single "lock everything/unlock everything" at the top if you just want to leave it at that. Or maybe a lock/unlock checkbox that you can select all or select none?

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Either way, really good idea. It could be a pain for the admins to set up initially, but not nearly as painful as having to tell everyone on first login to set it so they don't get spammed and then have people unhappy that they're not hearing anything/unhappy that they're hearing too much. 

Cirrus
Community Participant

I guess "off and lock" might not make sense... IDK why you would withhold notifications from your students, lol. So maybe just on, on and lock, off?

Jeff_F
Community Champion

 @scottdennis ‌ - you mention resetting notifications and I am thinking of just how important it is for instructors to be notified when there is a submission comment.  If instructors disable this notification I am not sure they will ever be nudged to read the student comment.