[Notifications] Formatting of Announcement Notifications

[ddilkes]

It would be great to see more information in the announcement email notifications. At the moment, the formatting and images are all stripped from the notifications. The email notification also does not include information on who posted the announcement- it would be great if they included the poster and even the profile pic by default.

Could we please maintain formatting and images in email announcement notification?

[brent_scholar]

This is another area that I shake my head at Canvas, which is "supposed" to be superior in terms of its friendliness. My university is new to Canvas, and our students are blaming us for bad announcements since they do not make sense when they are stripped down. We spend a long time creating announcements which will engage our students, one of the reasons we moved to Canvas, and then it gets taken away. This has got to be fixed.

Regarding the comment from someone about their team being overworked to work on this...hire more people!

Very Truly Yours,

Brent

P.S. It was also strange that I could upload my video directly to the announcement, but when I uploaded it to the course files, I could not link it to the announcement. #notuserfriendly

[jbuchner]

Has anyone at considered what the unformatted announcements read like for people using screen readers? Is it as big a mess as I imagine? For example, when I add a link to an announcement, the link gets broken out as the http address. I've only just recently started to think about how that might be interpreted by a reader, but it's not great in my head.

[brent_scholar]

I have an idea!  If this was close to being worked on for Q4 2019, let's all rally our institutions and get others to vote for it too. I sent it on our instructional designers and they are going to look into seeing what can be done. I will at least let me peers know to...We need to pass the word on as many do not like the stripped down emails, but maybe they don't know what they can do about it.

Here's to the Announcement Formatting Revolution!

Brent

[jbuchner]

Great idea, but voting alone doesn't get ideas into production. 

[dan_baeckstrom]

Absolutely unbelievable that this is not already a feature. How can it be that the sender of the message is not announced???

[dancomins]

This is desperately needed in this pandemic age so that we can communicate more effectively with our campus constituents. I am the Director of Academic Technology as well as a Canvas admin at California State University, Sacramento. We have been trying to add images and embedded videos to both brand (adding a logo to the announcement), as well as provide more multimedia explanations of new features, etc. Everything looks great on the platform itself, but gets stripped out completely for the notification email to people. We have noticed that people sometimes just close announcements without every reading them. You added that "force notify" option, which is a great way to create a different channel that give us another shot at reaching people, but gets hindered by this current limitation. In addition, I have received a lot of feedback that without formatting (or the ability to add something as simple as a campus logo) that the Canvas notification emails look like spam or phishing attempts, so again, may be getting ignored. I think it's time to upgrade the announcements tool to have feature parity with what's able to be displayed in the system itself.

[jbuchner]

This just happened to me, our elementary school had a message in my inbox, and the text, without any indication there was a video link. The text of the message made more sense, once I clicked on the view announcement link. 

[mlondrigan]

A big yes for me.  I always like to add photo's to my announcements!

Cheers Michael Londrigan LIM College

[kbear1]

How has this been "open for conversation" since 2016 and nothing has been done??  This is a basic essential feature that Canvas is failing to provide.  Making improvements to their product doesn't bring them in any more money so they simply do not care.

[MarkRose]

Please fix this problem!   Announcements that are properly formatted are critical if we are to use this feature in Canvas.  RIght now it is easier/better to collect the list of names and then use external e-mail software.