[Notifications] Formatting of Announcement Notifications

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?

73 Comments
chip_gagnon
Community Member

I just want to add my voice to this thread. It doesn't seem like it would be that hard to include images.

Can someone from Canvas explain why images (and other stuff) are stripped out of the email version of announcements?

c_murphy
Community Participant

I agree, this is really a problem because some tutors just don't realise and important information gets stripped out of their messages.

lgekeler
Community Participant

This has got to be fixed.

scott_therkalse
Community Member

In the past the announcements that were emailed out from my canvas account were formatted the same way they were created (i.e. with COLORS), now all formatting is stripped (not by the individual email recipients but by Canvas). Canvas ANNOUNCEMENTS SENT  VIA EMAIL need to have the option to maintain INDENTICAL FORMATTING to what is displayed in canvas.

BrunoBasic
Community Member

Hello good people,

I would like to add my support for this feature that has seemingly been asked for since 2016.

It is a bit amusing that this comment box has more text editing features than the messages written in the Canvas Inbox.

The Announcements in Canvas contain a rich text editor, so having it in the Inbox function is not an outlandish request.

Have a good day.

JuliaCF
Community Member

This has also come up with our faculty who use announcements with images (for teaching purposes) and until today didn't know the images didn't convey to the emails. Would love this feature, please!

TiffanyStull
Community Participant

In our current LMS, many instructors use Announcements as their sole form of email communication with students.  It will be very problematic for them if these emails do not include all the content from their announcements.

According to my testing, as an instructor, I did not receive a copy of any of my announcements via email when I posted them.  So I would have no idea that my students might be missing some critical content.  In one of my announcements, I included an embedded image, with appropriate alt text describing the image.  Even the alt text for the image was stripped out in the announcement emailed to students!

If this issue cannot be addressed properly, there needs to be an indication of what was stripped in the email notification.  For example: 

[Embedded image with alt text: "A fluffy cat swipes his paw on a big screen with the Angry Birds game, scores 5000 points, and opens his mouth widely."]

or

[LaTeX math equation, access the announcement in your course to read]

manthoney
Community Member

Coming back here after many years away to say PLEASE DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS. Instructors shouldn't have to find out the hard way that their media doesn't get emailed to students. There are some good ideas on this thread...remove media options from the announcement RCE, include alt text -- these don't require working with external vendors (Google, Microsoft) to fix the problem.

 

Thanks! This type of communication is essential in online courses. Instructors need to know what their students will and won't receive from Announcement notifications.

KurtFowler
Community Novice

I'm just adding my voice to these requests for the ability include images and formatting to email notifications.  I had no trouble adding images to email notifications in Blackboard, so it's frustrating to move to Canvas and miss such a seemingly simple feature.

ppoet
Community Explorer

I am adding my comments as this feature should be standard in an LMS.  We are trying to use Canvas in different ways and this is a basic need for any course or group.