Display most recent announcements on a Page

[nathan-swailes]

  This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

     

  Idea open for vote Wed. August 3, 2016 - Wed. November 2, 2016  Learn more about voting...

Having set up an informative home page that displays all the important course information when students open the course, the only thing that is missing is the most recent announcement(s) displayed. A small horizontal widget bar would be ideal and could be placed under the course title or at the top of the page.

Announcements are vital to the running of a course, reminding students of a  room change, to bring something with them to a certain session etc. While they can subscribe to receive announcements to their email or subscribe to the rss feed (which are both encouraged), it would make so much sense to have the most recent important announcement appear on the Home Page too. This most recent announcement would be visible immediately to all users when the student opens the course, without having to navigate to the announcements page.

I have tried displaying the announcement RSS feed in an iframe on the home page, which seemed like the perfect solution, but unfortunately Chrome and Firefox (not sure about Safari) don't automatically support this without add-ons - only IE does. So that wont work for 95% of students.

I am certain students would find this useful and instructors would feel much more confident that their most recent message is reaching everyone if it is front and center, regardless of whether a student forgot to visit the announcement page or did not subscribe to an rss feed or email announcements visit the announcement page.

Maybe there is already a widget out there that I am missing that will fill this gap. Or other solutions or ideas out there to solve this?

Comments from Instructure

For more information, please read through the Canvas Production Release Notes (2017-01-07)

[nathan-swailes]

An early gift for the holidays! Thank you Renee - can't wait to use this!

[kmeeusen]

While Announcements on the Home Page has just been announced in the latest Beta Release announcement, I am announcing that I will continue to use  @rkelley1 ​'s great work-round for awhile at least. As an adjunct teaching the same course at more than one college (in more than one account), I have found that I like the ability to post one announcement, in one course, in one account and have it populate to my home page in every course I am teaching in any account.

This in no way negates the importance of this new Canvas feature for both students and faculty. It is an awesome new tool in our arsenal, and it originated from this Canvas Feature Idea submitted by the wonderful Community Member,  @nathan-swailes ,  and supported by so many other Community members - thanks everybody!

I hope that other adjuncts in similar situations will find Robert's work-round, and be able to take advantage of it.

KLM

[nathan-swailes]

Absolutely. The workarounds provided by community members are amazing and essential. I am personally thankful that you guys exist to share your extensive knowledge to help me make my courses the best they can be. I appreciate you and so do my students.

The fact that Canvas is flexible enough to allow us all to develop workarounds like this means we can ensure our courses address our own personal needs and the needs of our students. The  Instructional Designers group is a treasure trove of helpful resources like  @rkelley1 ​ workaround and if community members keep pushing the envelope by posting about elements of their insightful course design, genius fixes, coding tips and workarounds then great things will continue to happen.

I have tested the new Announcements on the Home Page feature in the beta release and, while it may not meet the specific needs of everyone's course(s), the ease at which you can now implement the display of recent announcements on the front/homepage of a course  will make it a valuable addition for many and I do encourage you to check it out. (Course Settings > more options > one click to switch it on/off > set your preferred max # of visible announcements [or here's the official how to])

In addition, it is also hugely encouraging that 'Canvas' actual listens to its community members. Now we just need to put our collective heads together to develop a widget that automatically distributes royalties to everyone for their incredible ideas... just kidding (not really :smileylaugh:).

Keep up the amazing work, Happy Canvas'ing and all the best for the Spring semester when it rolls around.

- Nathan   

[kmeeusen]

Wait, you were kidding about the royalties  @nathan-swailes 

Bummer!

I've already played with the new feature, and gave Kudos to it in my post, but I'm still looking for that big fat check in the mail!

Bummer again!

KLM

[rkelley1]

Of course : )

[Renee_Carney]

  This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

For more information, please read through the Canvas Production Release Notes (2017-01-07)

[Renee_Carney]

Thank you to  @nathan-swailes  for submitting this idea, as well as,  @kmeeusen ​,  @mpilati ​,  @rkelley1 ​, stefaniesanders for your contributions. Your investment in this idea helped refine a feature which is now part of Canvas!

[nathan-swailes]

This is awesome! Thanks to everyone involved in getting this useful feature deployed with the latest Canvas release. You are all amazing.

[stevensons]

This is a great feature, and I'm thrilled to see it! Definitely an improvement on cutting and pasting each new announcement into the home page.

I do have a suggestion, though--it would be nice if the announcement widget appeared BELOW the header that displays the course name, or could be moved elsewhere on the page somehow. It looks odd from a design perspective to have it above the course header...

[mpilati]

I am thrilled to see this - and delighted by how simple it is. I do, however, have to agree with Sarah - it seems a little odd for it to be floating above the Home page.

Having said that, perhaps some think that makes sense and they don't want to clutter their formal landing page. In a perfect world, one would have the option of having it above or below.

Note - none of this takes away from having this feature. I let my faculty know it was coming last month - and am delighted to not have done so too soon. Yeah!