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)

[natalie_norton1]

This looks great, but we use the syllabus for our homepage template on all courses - is it possible to enable this when using the syllabus as the homepage?  It would be really useful if we could!

[mpilati]

I'm with you Natalie - as soon as I shared this functionality, one of my colleagues wanted to use Modules as their Homepage - and it did not work. While I am personally an advocate of not using these pre-defined Canvas elements as a Homepage, I respect the interest of others in doing so. It's not clear why that functionality would not be permitted. I'm betting that there is a reason??

[sheldonj1]

This function, provided in the update, is very useful to me particularly.

There are two sections to this comment: a) background of my desire to use it b) comment on enabling the function

a) My students actually checked Blackboard (tm) because I actually "took to heart" the education thing about "when one provides quick, and hopefully positive, feedback the students respond positively".

To that end when I updated Blackboard(tm) IN ANY WAY, the student grades, that I had uploaded a new module, etc. I posted an announcement, with a changed image and changed colours on the folders of the left menu. 

In that manner the student had an immediate visual notification that something "new" had happened in Blackboard(tm) and that they should read the announcement.

Again, to that end, I explored different ways to "simulate" such on Canvas, at first thinking that I could change the "landing page" away from the "home" page to the "announcements" page, which, I found, is not able to be done.

So, searching on the site I found a "workaround" of a "yellow box" which can be added in the editable HTML which, does, indeed, produce a "box" which can be edited to provide a "text announcement" on the home page.

That is fine, except that it is not also enabled on the regular announcement page, and therefore it does not provide an e-mail announcement to the student

NOTE

There is, of late, a discussion at the college that the students are being "swamped" with e-mails and there is a suggestion of having a "portal" for all e-mails that are not directly to individual students.

END NOTE

b) From the latest release:

To enable this feature, instructors can select the Show Recent Announcements checkbox in Course Settings and specify the number of recent announcements that should be shown (up to 15). By default, the interface displays three announcements unless the number is adjusted.

i) When an announcement is made in the announcement page an identical announcement is made on the home page.

ii) When the announcement title is clicked the text of the announcement is displayed, if the text is coloured the colour is displayed.  A clickable link is provided that will take one to the announcement on the announcement page.

ii) If one places an image in the announcement itself the image will not be displayed in the announcement on the home page.

iii) If one places an image "in the announcement" BEFORE THE TEXT the image will be displayed in the announcement box on the home page but any associated text will not be displayed.  If an image is placed after the text in the announcement the image will not be shown in the announcement box on the home page.

MY PARTICULAR USEAGE AND FORMAT

a) I have enabled two (2) announcents to be shown. This will allow the previous announcement to be seen below the new one to emphasize that there is a new announcement.

b) I change the text colour to a different colour as opposed to the announcement which is below, again, to visually catch the attention of the student.

c) I place the date in all caps at the beginning of the title of the announcement: SATURDAY 28 jan. yada yada.

d) in the body of the announcement if the student does not need to actually "view" the "whole announcement" I place the following:

"Don't click link: I have entered grades.

If there is an image or whatever in the announcement I place the following:

"Click the link" I have uploaded an image from class.

The above are just my particular musings and are not necessarily recommended for the community at large.

Congrats to the development team for deciding to enable the function and congrats to the OP and the commenters.

james